







A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART 


Art Lovers^ Series 

V, 

The Madonna in Aft 
Christ in Ajrt 
Angels in Art 
Saints in Aft 

Heroines of the Bible in Art 
Child Life in Art 
Love in Art 
Shakespeare in Art 
A History of American Art 
Beautiful Women in Art 

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200 Summer St., Boston, Mass, 





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Mother and Child I f 

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Photogravure from the painting by George de Forrest Brush i I 


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A HISTORY OF 
AMERICAN ART 


By 

SADAKICHI HARTMANN 


In Two Volumes 

VoL. I. 

Illustrated 



BOSTON 

L. C. PAGE & COMPANT 
MDCCC'CII 


Copyright, iqot 
By L. C. Page & Company 

(inxorporated) 

All rights reserved 


Colonial ^rf80 

Elect’xtyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Ca 
Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 


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TO MY UNCLE 


lErnst J^artmann 

AMONG WHOSE BOOKS AND ART TREASURES 
I SPENT MY CHILDHOOD, AND WHOM 
I HAVE TO THANK FOR MY FIRST 
APPRECIATION OF ART. 



CONTENTS, 


CHAPTER 


PAGE 

I. 

American Art before 1828 . 

• 

• 15 

II. 

Our Landscape Painters 

• 

. 46 

ni. 

The Old School 

• 

. 137 

IV. 

The New School . 

• 

. 217 


1 


i 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


Brush. — Mother and Child . 

PAGE 

Frontispiece 

Copley. — Family Picture 



19 

West. — Battle of the Hague 



23 

Trumbull. — Battle of Bunker Hill 



29 

Vanderlyn. — Ariadne of Naxos . 



39 

Cole. — The Voyage of Life (Childhood) 


49 

Vedder. — Landscape 



81 

Inness — Georgia Pines . 



87 

Wyant — On the Beaver 



91 

Twachtman. — The Poplars . 



"3 

Martin. — Harp of the Winds 



123 

Tryon. — Spring .... 



131 

Weir. — Sailing of the Pilgrims . 



143 

Johnson. — Old Stage-coach 



159 

Hunt. — The Flight of Night 



167 

Hunt. — Charles River with Bathers 


171 

Waterman. — Maurouf among the 

CHANTS 

Mer- 

175 

La Farge. — Christ and Nicodemus 

. 


181 

Homer. — Inside the Bar 

. 


195 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, 


Eakins. — Operation 
Fuller. — A Turkey Pasture 
Fuller. — Romany Girl . 

Chase. — Portrait of a Child 
Snell. — Twilight on the River . 
Walker. — Spring Morning . 
Trego. — The Colour - guard . 
Brush. — The Indian and the Lily 
Brush. — Mother and Child . 
Thayer. — The Virgin 
Church. — Viking’s Daughter 
Blashfield. — Strains of Grey 
Dewing. — In the Garden 
Ryder. — Flying Dutchman . . . 


PAGE 
. 201 
. 205 

• 213 

. 227 

. 237 
. 243 

. 25s 

. 263 
. 269 
. 273 

. 291 

. 297 

• 305 

• 319 


A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART, 


CHAPTER I. 

AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 

URING the reign of King George 
III., when the town of Boston 
had scarcely more than eighteen 
thousand inhabitants, there hung in the 
library of Harvard University a copy of 
the Cardinal Bentivoglio by Van Dyck, 
painted by John Smybert, the first Eng- 
lish artist of any note who settled for a 
length of time in New England. 

This picture, although nothing but a pale 
reflection of a master-work, served a num- 
ber of young American painters as chief 
object of inspiration, — Copley, Trumbull, 

15 



1 6 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Wilson Peak, and Allston copying it in 
turn, — and may, in this respect, be re- 
garded as the first impetus to the founda- 
tion of a native American art. 

This fact in itself is significant enough 
to show the conditions of art resources at 
the time when young Copley in Boston 
and the Quaker boy West in Philadelphia 
made their first venture in the world and 
their profession. In our day of constant 
interchange it seems hard to realise the 
position of a painter in the eighteenth 
century. There was absolutely no art fric- 
tion in the atmosphere ; the few artists 
who had achieved anything like excellence, 
as Malbone, the miniaturist, E. Savage, F. 
V. Doornick, O. A. Bullard, Pine, the Eng- 
lishmen Blackburn and Williams, Cosmo 
Alexander, the teacher of Stuart, and 
Samuel King, of Newport, the teacher of 
Allston, could diffuse their sentiments, 
opinions, and experiences only in most 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1828. 1 7 

limited circles. Exhibitions were un- 
known, and the patronage of the few 
families who were no longer brought face 
to face with the elementary problems of 
existence was confined to portraiture. 
The majority of painters of this period, as 
well as that of the early part of the nine- 
teenth century, were “ travelling artists,” 
who went forth over the country, painting 
portraits or sign-boards, decorations for 
stage-coaches and fire-engines, or what- 
ever else they could find to do for practice 
and living. The talented artist, who felt 
a soul struggling within him, was forced 
to let it expand with no help from his 
surroundings — indeed in most instances 
with the very meagrest of mechanical re- 
sources. 

The New England States, although op- 
posed to art on principle, were after all 
that part of the country in which signs 
of literary and artistic activity became 


1 8 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

first apparent in sporadic and individual 
cases. 

John Singleton Copley (1737-1815) was 
the only American artist of this period 
who did meritorious work before he came 
under foreign influences. Already as a 
young man he wielded his brush with 
more than ordinary dexterity, and revealed 
himself as a full-fledged personality. His 
large compositions, “ Death of the Earl 
of Chatham” (at the National Gallery, 
London) and “ The Death of Major 1 er- 
son,” which established his fame in Eng- 
land, are painted with a breadth and virility 
that remotely recall Rembrandt and Franz 
Hals. The grouping of the numerous por- 
trait figures in the Chatham picture is 
most skilfully arranged, and the distribu- 
tion of the high lights on the principal 
scene of action, on the heads of the 
numerous figures, and the brown-panelled 
walls, is handled with astonishing mas- 



Copley. — F amily Picture. 



AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 


21 


tery. His style, simple and matter-of-fact, 
influenced David to that extent that he 
suddenly changed his style and painted 
the death of Marat and Lepelletier in 
a similar realistic fashion. Of course, 
Copley’s creations were still studio pic- 
tures; he stood in no close relation with 
nature, and could never overcome the 
hardness of his outlines, but his efforts 
give us at least half-way artistic reflec- 
tions of the costume and character of his 
time. To our art only the portraits which 
he painted in Boston are of importance. 
They lead us into interiors of the “ royal- 
ist era,” with carved chairs and showy 
curtains, peopled with well-to-do men and 
women, proud of their birth, and lavishly 
robed in ruffles, silver buckles, gold-em- 
broidered waistcoats, and rich brocade 
dressing-gowns. 

Copley’s contemporary, Benjamin West 
(1738-1820), had nothing at all in com- 


22 


A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 


mon with the development of American 
art. He left at an early age for England, 
where he climbed the very pinnacle of 
social if not artistic success, becoming a 
personal friend of the king, who almost 
exclusively employed him as his historical 
painter from 1767 until 1802, and suc- 
ceeding Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Pres- 
identship of the Royal Academy in 1792. 
He became responsible for many portraits, 
and endless historical and Biblical works, 
which can be studied to the best advan- 
tage at the London National Gallery and 
the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. 
His dignified but stilted compositions, like 
“ Christ Rejected ” and “ Death on the 
Pale Horse,” have become absolutely un- 
palatable to our modern generation. We 
appreciate his love for heroic size, — the 
canvas of his “ Christ Rejected ” is 200 by 
264, — his daring innovation of dressing 
historical characters in the costume of the 



West. — Battle of the Hague. 



AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 25 

time and country in which they lived 
(“ The Death of Wolfe ”), but remain abso- 
lutely unmoved by his cold, relief-like 
drawing and dead, gray colouring. It is 
rather his picturesque personality than his 
art which attracts us to-day. 

Nevertheless the influence of his career 
was favourably felt. His success had been 
so extraordinary that it fired the ambition 
of many a young American painter. What 
was possible to a poor Quaker seemed to 
be also within easy reach of other talents. 
It served as an encouragement to take up 
painting as a regular profession. And his 
native town, Philadelphia, where it was 
said that the Cherokee Indians taught 
him the secret of preparing colour, prof- 
ited the most by it. It was the first city 
of the Union where opportunities for art 
growth and a moderate patronage pre- 
sented themselves. Matthew Pratt and 
Robert Feke, a Quaker, who enjoyed the 


26 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

reputation of painting almost as well as 
West, painted numerous colonial family 
portraits. Charles Wilson Peale (1741- 
1829), a man of rare versatility and also 
a portraitist of some merit, established 
the first art gallery, a “ Museum ” of his- 
torical portraits, in his residence at the 
corner of Third and Lombard Streets, 
Philadelphia, and helped to found the 
Philadelphia Academy in 1805, whose 
director he was until 1810. 

In the meantime the first two of what 
we may call “ native talents ” had exerted 
themselves in behalf of American paint- 
ing: Gilbert Stuart (i 755-1828) and John 
Trumbull (1756-1843). 

Gilbert Stuart, born at Narragansett, 
R. L, is one of the most remarkable colour- 
ists and portrait painters of modern times, 
and had for almost a century no superior 
on this side of the Atlantic. His stay 
with West in London harmed the origi- 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1828. 27 

nality of his work in no way ; from the 
very start his art was as delicate and re- 
fined as that of his contemporaries Rom- 
ney and Gainsborough, with whom he 
successfully competed. Many of the best 
years of his art life, however, were spent 
in America, where he painted many nota- 
bles of the day, among them George 
Washington, who sat for him three times. 
(The Vaughan picture belongs to Mrs. 
Joseph Harrison, Philadelphia, the Lans- 
downe, a full-length portrait, is at the 
Philadelphia Academy, and the Athe- 
naeum head at the Boston Museum of 
Fine Arts.) 

Brilliant colouring, firm yet remarkably 
free handling, natural, lifelike posing, and 
an individual conception which dominates 
all the details of his workmanship, are the 
striking characteristics of all his pictures. 
The richness of his flesh-tints, and his un- 
erring precision in modelling the face with- 


28 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

out the help of lines, — he always remained 
true to his much quoted maxim, “ There 
are no lines in nature” — all apparently 
so simple and yet so massive and effect- 
ive, are astonishing. An inexhaustible 
virility and ever-buoyant enthusiasm fur- 
nished the key-note of his character, and 
the result was portraits of men and 
women, who seem alive and imbued with 
an individual character of their own, even 
if the colour of their complexion is sub- 
ject rather to an idealising method than 
to nature. His brush work as well as his 
colour — with the exception of those por- 
traits that have of late acquired a curious 
purplish hue — are as interesting to-day 
as they were one hundred years ago. 
He was a past master of his art, and it 
took almost a century of ceaseless work 
and endeavour before American painters 
learned io p amt again with the same ease 
and grace as did Gilbert Stuart, when our 




Trumbull. — Battle of Bunker Hill. 




AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 3 1 

American art was still in its swaddling- 
clothes. 

Trumbull was quite a different type. 
He was less richly endowed with natural 
gifts ; with him every accomplishment 
meant strenuous study, and the less said 
of his merit as a painter the better. Yet 
he will always remain dear to us for his 
glorification of our revolutionary history, 
for his “ Battb Bunker Hill,” “ Death of 
Montgomery,” and “ Declaration of Inde- 
pendence,” reproductions of which are 
familiar to every child, as no primer of 
history is published without them. Most 
of his pictures are in the art gallery of 
Yale College. 

America had now become an independ- 
ent nation, and everywhere a restless 
activity set in. The problems of exist- 
ence had to be solved, new forms of 
government founded, and manifold incon- 
gruous elements welded into one nation. 


32 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

The growth of our art, however, was 
rather handicapped than benefited by 
these conditions. The “ royalists,” the 
only ones who could afford the luxury 
of art, had left the country, and the rest 
of the population, forced to wrest from 
fate the right of existence, were too busy 
with their material welfare to feel any- 
thing but indifference for those few asser- 
tions of poetic sentiment that now and 
then appeared on the surface of public 
life. In the first twenty years of the 
nineteenth century our art life was still 
utterly insignificant. But again three 
men stepped forth who bore upon their 
brush-tips the honour and progress of 
American art: Thomas Sully (1783- 
1872), John Vanderlyn (1776-1852), and 
Washington Allston (1779-1843). 

While the second war with Great 
Britain was raging in the North, Sully, 
having chosen Philadelphia for his per- 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 ^ 26 , 33 

manent home, rapidly became the most 
fashionable portrait painter of the day. 
In forming his style, he had been chiefly 
influenced by Thomas Lawrence, and 
like him he portrayed all the fashionable 
women of his time. Nearly every Phil- 
adelphian family with ancestors has to 
show some of these sweet, musing faces, 
with their robes draped picturesquely 
about them, and with nothing to do but 
to look graceful. At the historical por- 
trait exhibition at the Philadelphia Acad- 
emy, 1887-88, Sully was represented by 
one hundred and six pictures, showing 
great versatility and extraordinary powers 
of conception and execution. He himself 
would, no doubt, have been the first to 
admit that he had done too much, but in 
that he is not exceptional. Few artists 
have the heart to refuse commissions, 
when such are almost thrust upon them, 
— as was the case with Sully since he had 


34 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

painted a full-length portrait of Queen 
Victoria in 1838, — and try for less work, 
more thoroughly executed. 

About the same time that Sully de- 
picted Pennsylvania ladies of fashion, 
Vanderlyn, living in Rome in the house 
that Salvator Rosa once occupied, painted 
his “ Ariadne,” and Allston was at work 
in Cambridgeport at his enormous canvas, 
“ Belshazzar’s Feast.” 

In the work of both these men, the 
influence of Italy is palpable. Many 
pictures of the old masters, either origi- 
nals or copies of more or less merit, had 
been imported from the Italian peninsula 
during the disturbances which then con- 
vulsed Europe, and strongly influenced 
public taste in their favour. The artists, 
waiting patiently, but in vain, for the pub- 
lic to come up to their ideals, decided to 
meet it half-way by studying the Italian 
methods of painting. And so it became 


I 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 35 


the fashion for young art students to go 
to Italy — Henry Bainbridge, a pupil of 
Mengs and Battoni, was the first — to 
complete their art studies, as later on 
they went to Dusseldorf and Barbizon. 

But there was little for a painter to 
learn in Europe at that time, no matter 
where he went. The art of painting had 
fallen asleep with the decadence of the 
Dutch school, and was once more in 
a lethargic state. It was the time of 
Dayids and Overbecks and Wests, a 
time devoid of great painters. All the 
teachings of academies and universities 
tended to monumental art; drawing and 
composition were mastered solely as the 
language of ideas, and the human figure 
was studied chiefly for the expression of 
narrative or dramatic action. Concep- 
tions so lofty could hardly And an ade- 
quate sphere in easel painting, but needed 
canvas of a larger scale. 


36 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Washington Allston represents this 
school in America. Thanks to Jared 
B. Flagg, his biographer, we know more 
about this painter’s life and public career 
than that of most artists. This biography 
is a very reliable and elaborate work, going 
into the minutest details. But there is 
hardly a demand for such a memorial of 
the painter of “ Belshazzar’s Feast.” Only 
a certain set of old-fashioned amateurs, 
who cannot keep pace with the rapid 
strides of modern art, and who still cling 
to Allston’s memory as to a sort of 
American Titian, may have looked out 
for such a book, and now greet it with 
all the mild enthusiasm left to old age. 
The younger generation, however, aspir- 
ing to understand modern art, which 
sacrifices ideas and feelings to technical 
accomplishment, has but little in common 
with the austere dilettantism of Washing- 
ton Allston. 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 37 

Washington Allston could be treated 
in a friendly manner without receiving 
the cult of a demigod and absurd com- 
parison with the cinque-cento masters. 
As a man of artistic temperament and 
ambition, he stood high above even the 
more advanced of his period, and Long- 
fellow’s, Lowell’s, and Emerson’s admira- 
tion for him can probably be explained 
by the sympathy they felt for that quiet 
enthusiast, whose dreary fate it was to 
paint “ under debt ” in Cambridgeport. 
What a Hades Cambridgeport must have 
been seventy-five years ago to a man of 
Allston’s character ! 

And we, standing in the full glare of sun- 
light, when we look back to the past, and 
perceive his dignified figure against the 
dark, sombre background of his unfin- 
ished “ Belshazzar’s Feast,” at the Boston 
Museum, with its heavy architectonic 
background and life-size figures, — even 


38 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the most radical impressionist among us, 
— should feel something like reverence for 
that man, who ever shunned popularity 
and held nothing dearer than his art. 
Many of our mercenary painters might go 
to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and 
learn something of that sublime botcher, 
who was sincere even when he made such 
daubs as “Lorenzo and Jessica.” 

His nobility of character can best be 
traced in his outline drawings; they are 
firm, graceful, and competent, but he in- 
variably failed to convey the idea they 
expressed into his finished pictures, which 
have but little merit in regard to colour- 
ing, values, or modelling. He was an imi- 
tator all his life and very often a copyist, 
as in “The Sisters,” where a whole figure 
is borrowed from Titian’s “ Lavinia.” 

He liked the architectonic background 
of Titian, the Michael Angelo attitudes 
of Tintoretto, the purity of design of 



I 


Vanderlyn. — Ariadne of Naxos. 






AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 4 1 

Raphael, and now and then demon- 
strated in his paintings the result of these 
studies. Of all his paintings, that are at 
present in America, his “ Angel Liberat- 
ing St. Peter from Prison,” in the insane 
asylum at Worcester, is the only one 
that has decided merit. The slender 
figure of the angel, robed in white, his 
sweet Raphaelic face, framed in by waves 
of brown hair, is beautiful, and almost 
worth a trip to Worcester. His portraits, 
like those of his mother, and of Coleridge, 
represent, perhaps, his best work, though 
they can in no way stand comparison with 
the portraits of Gilbert Stuart. 

A direct outcome of the Italian school 
was Vanderlyn, who has painted only two 
pictures of decided merit, “Marius Sitting 
on the Ruins of Carthage ” (in the posses- 
sion of Bishop Kip, California), medalled 
personally by Napoleon I. in 1808, and 
his “ Ariadne of Naxos ” at the Philadel- 


42 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

phia Academy. Few painters have ever 
succeeded in rendering the nude with 
such purity of expression as in this figure 
“pillowed upon her arm and raven hair.” 
It is in my opinion the best nude this 
country has ever produced, and I say 
this after due consideration of “ A Nude ” 
by Fuller and “The Reflection” by Fitz. 
Many of our modern painters may be 
technically Vanderlyn’s superiors, but the 
“ innocent repose ” and “ unconscious love- 
liness ” of this Ariadne seem impossible 
for them to attain. At that time realism 
was still unknown, and the figure is in 
consequence an ideal one, but so beauti- 
fully modelled and so delicious in its 
flesh-tints that one willingly misses the 
modern note. Vanderlyn’s technique 
was in every way sufficient to realise 
the conception. Only the landscape is 
of inferior workmanship, but its dark 
green monotonies form a delightful back- 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 


43 

ground and contrast with the red and 
the white of the drapery, and the rose 
tints of the body. 

The excellence of the work of some of 
the men mentioned in this chapter was 
largely due to foreign influences, and did 
not combine toward a practical and com- 
mon end. Each one had to work out his 
own salvation. Besides they attempted 
too much. Great epics cannot be accom- 
plished by amateurs. Their gigantic can- 
vases might not have been filled success- 
fully even by a Veronese or Tintoretto. 
Consequently their talents were not always 
shown to their best advantage in these 
ambitious tasks. The less important 
their work happened to be, the more 
artistic it seemed to become. Some of 
the academical studies after the nude 
by Trumbull are charming, and some 
of Allston’s sketches contain delightful 
passages. 


44 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

The joint endeavour to pass to styles 
more naturalistic and poetical, to endow 
American art with traits distinctly native, 
was made during the following fifty years. 
It was a hard struggle, many mistakes 
were made, and although the artists wished 
to rely entirely upon their own technical 
resources, they never succeeded in freeing 
themselves from the imitation of foreign 
conventionalities. Only after years of dil- 
ettantism were they wise enough to study 
more advanced foreign styles and develop 
those complete methods which sustain our 
present art. 

The more astonishing do the few but 
brilliant efforts of those men who nour- 
ished the growth of Amercan art at its 
beginning appear to us now. The art of 
few nations can boast of having possessed 
at the very start one of the most remark- 
able portraitists of all times and countries, 
and to have produced, in regard to propor- 


AMERICAN ART BEFORE 1 828. 45 

tion and symmetry of form and composi- 
tion, gravity and dignity in motive and 
conception, one of the best nudes ever 
painted. 


CHAPTER II. 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 

N the winter of 1828^9, — two 
years after the National Academy 
of Design was founded in New 
York, — Thomas Cole (1801-48), then an 
absolutely unknown artist, fighting bravely 
against every form of adversity, held an 
exhibition of his sketches in New York, 
and gained immediate recognition among 
the profession, so much so that John 
Trumbull, Asher B. Durand, and William 
Dunlap purchased some of his work and 
sought his acquaintanceship. These were 
sketches that he had painted in the Cats- 
kills, the banks, rocks, woods, dells and 
cascades around the neighbourhood of 
Clove, destined to become the stamping- 

46 



OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 47 

ground of so many of his followers. They 
contained as good work as anything he 
did later, his observation of the form and 
outline of nature was even keener at this 
time, than when his imagination was given 
a fuller sway. 

It was a memorable exhibition, as it 
gave America its first painter who painted 
landscapes professionally. Until then Cole 
had either struggled along, half starving, in 
Philadelphia or New York garrets, thank- 
ful when a customer appeared to buy a 
picture for ten or twenty dollars, or gone 
forth over the country, after the fashion 
of travelling artists, with a green bag over 
his shoulder containing his painting mate- 
rial and a flute, stopping at taverns and 
painting a portrait or sign-board in return 
for board and lodging. Now the hard 
part of his fight was over; he came into 
contact with men who had drawn their 
inspiration from Benjamin West, and who 


48 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

owned at least lofty ideals, if but little 
technique. He soon found his way to 
England, into the studios of Turner, Con- 
stable, Lawrence, and other men of note. 
On his return to this country he, however, 
showed that he was less influenced by 
these modern men, who were just estab- 
lishing their fame, than by the study of 
Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa. He 
was an ardent scholar of English litera- 
ture, and the influence of Bunyan and 
Walter Scott can be traced in all his 
works. He was the upholder of the imag- 
inative landscape, he transcribed nature 
with the glance of a poetic imagination, 
and Bryant and Cooper found much to 
praise in his works. He was in truth 
more of a poet than a painter. His draw- 
ing was feeble, his sense for colour un- 
developed, and his touch hard and dry, 
like that of most of his contemporaries. 
He mastered chiaroscuro, however, and 




I 


i 


I 

I 

I 



Cole. — The Voyage of Life (Childhood). 



OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


51 


his big canvases show how far nature can 
be represented by mere light and shade 
composition. The serious turn of his 
mind gave at times a religious fervour to 
his pictures, which commands our respect, 
even when we fail altogether to appreciate 
the result. It is difficult for a modern 
man to appreciate panorama-like scener- 
ies like “The Cross of the World” and his 
famous serial, “ The Voyage of Life ” (ex- 
hibited in the thirties), the more so as time 
has darkened their colour beyond retrieve. 
Yet in all his compositions, particularly 
in his “ Prometheus,” “ The Architect’s 
Dream,” and his serial “ The Course of 
Empire,” consisting of five large canvases 
(now at the Historical Society, New 
York) and representing a nation’s rise, 
progress, decline, and fall, a rapturous love 
of nature is evident, and a powerful mind 
seeking to find expression for some lofty 
literary ideal. The five pictures represent 


52 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the same locality ; the first shows the scene 
at sunrise in spring ; the second, the em- 
pire in its youth with the sun in the sky ; 
the third, the powerful city with temples, 
colonnades, and domes at harvest-time; 
the fourth, the destruction of the city by 
invaders. The last picture of the serial, 
entitled “ Desolation,” has rarely been sur- 
passed in solemn majesty and depth of 
thought. It represents a gray silent waste, 
broken by an expanse of water, once the 
harbour of a mighty city. A solitary 
moss-grown Corinthian column looms up 
in the fore-ground; behind it in the dis- 
tance a temple is seen in ruins. The 
moon, freeing herself from a stratum of 
clouds, pours her pale light on the desolate 
coast land, of which the wildness and soli- 
tude of primitive nature has again taken 
possession. 

Thomas Doughty, one of Cole’s con- 
temporaries, was also one of the “ young 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 53 

Americans ” who attracted favourable no- 
tice in England, as well as in his own 
country. Few men have done so well 
with so little experience. He was in the 
leather business until his twenty-eighth 
year. His pictures, although at times at- 
tempting large compositions, were known 
for their simplicity, their poetic traits, and 
soft, silvery tones. They are unpreten- 
tious as works of art, but the art historian 
cannot overlook them, exerting as they did 
an influence on the style of the landscapes 
that followed them. 

The third who has to be mentioned 
among the founders of American land- 
scape painting is Asher B. Durand (1796- 
1886), a man of larger technical experi- 
ence, but of less talent than the two for- 
mer. He was by profession (until 1835) 
a steel engraver, one of the most skilful 
our art ever possessed, but at the same 
time very successful in entirely different 


54 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

branches. He painted a head of Bryant, 
which placed him in rank with the best 
portrait painters of the time, and his land- 
scapes were so fresh and vigorous in treat- 
ment, and so massive in the handling of 
the backgrounds, that he can with right 
be regarded as one of the pioneers in 
this department. The care he had been 
obliged to give to engraving was, at times, 
a drawback to perfect mastery, but on the 
other hand also proved of assistance to 
him in the composition of lines. He had 
a keen insight into the individuality of 
trees, and his oak, sycamore, and butter- 
nut studies are very valuable reminis- 
cences of the woodlands he loved so 
much. His “ Edge of the Forest” at the 
Corcoran Gallery, poetical and digni- 
fied in conception, is probably his best 
known picture. I once saw a little sketch 
of his, entitled “ Garden of Love,” a 
meadow lined with trees and dotted 


i 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


55 


with figures, which was as free in its 
handling and as fluid in its colour as if 
a modern Paris or Munich man had 
painted it. 

Also John F. Kensett (1816-72), like 
so many artists, was originally an en- 
graver. In the forties he budded forth as 
a landscapist and soon held a commanding 
position, but despite several years spent in 
Europe, notably in Italy, he was technic- 
ally a mere amateur. His pictures were 
so thinly painted that they almost appear 
“flat” to us. Notwithstanding, his pic- 
tures, small compositions as a rule, pos- 
sessed a certain winning tenderness and 
suggestiveness, rare at that period of our 
art. He and Sandford R. Gifford were 
the first to strive for more pleasing colour 
harmonies and a more careful observation 
of atmospheric changes, the play of sun- 
light in the clouds and misty distances. 
They lacked firmness of drawing, and 


56 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

their love for niggling details and the 
brown tonality of their pictures disturbs 
us, although these lyrical attempts were 
really forerunners of the modern school, 
as it was not so much things as feelings 
that they tried to suggest. In quiet, 
dreamy coast and Hudson River scenes 
Kensett’s talents were shown at their 
best. Sandford R. Gifford was specially 
fond of dusky woodland scenes, the wild 
scenery of the West, and the Hudson 
River, with sunset skies, glowing atmos- 
phere, rolling mists, and trailing vapours. 
Melville Dewey represents the same 
phase in our present landscape art. One 
might travel far without having ever 
an opportunity again to see such a confu- 
sion of mists, winds, sunshine, moonlight 
and showers, and irisate colour effects as 
in Melville Dewey’s confuse and effemi- 
nate pictures. 

The men of this time, representing the 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


57 


so called Hudson River school, were in 
most cases self-taught, and serious, con- 
scientious workmen, with a rapturous en- 
thusiasm for nature, and absolute freedom 
from sensationalism. Commercialism had 
not yet interfered with art. Dealers were 
still unknown, and the interchange of 
ideas still very limited. 

Two men, effected more or less by 
these conditions, were George L. Brown, 
of Boston, who devoted his art to Italian 
scenery and strove for luminosity of colour, 
and Louis Mignot, of South Carolina, who 
was one of the first to draw attention to 
the inexhaustible variety of scenery of our 
continent. Mignot was one of the most 
skilled of our early painters in the han- 
dling of materials, and commanded a wide 
range of subjects, and, whether it was the 
glow of tropical scenery of the Rio Bamba 
in South America, the rush of iris-circled 
water at Niagara, or the fairy-like grace 


58 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

of new-fallen snow, he was equally ambi- 
tious in rendering the varied aspects of 
nature. At the opening of the Civil 
War he became a resident of England, 
and perhaps his most important picture, 
“ Snow in Hyde Park,” found its place in 
a private gallery there. 

Minor artists of note of that period 
were, J. W. Casilear, known for his deli- 
cate finish; J. A. Suydam, with his pen- 
sive bits of nature ; S. L. Gerry, whose 
dreamy, pleasant “Valley of Pemigewas- 
set ” attracted considerable attention ; R. 
W. Hubbard, with his New England land- 
scapes ; C. P. Cranch, a literatus by profes- 
sion, who showed in his Venetian pictures 
a correct perception of colour; and J. R. 
Meeker, who made a specialty of the 
lagoons of the South, haunted by pelicans 
and gaily coloured cranes. All these 
men show no dash or ingenuity, their 
work is deficient in drawing, colour, as 


bUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 59 

well as in tone quality; even in composi- 
tion and chiaroscuro they were not out of 
the ordinary. They had not yet learned 
to wield their brushes with modern dex- 
terity, and still saw nature with the eyes 
of Lorraine. If I mention their names 
it is largely because they, after all, played 
a part, however small, in the development 
of our landscape art. And it can be said 
in their favour that they approached their 
subjects with a reverent and poetic spirit 
and frequently succeeded in making pic- 
tures that were at least pleasant to look at. 

More than passing notice is deserved by 
J. F. Cropsey (1823-1900). I am well 
aware that his pictures have, of late, been 
the laughing-stock at the Academy ex- 
hibitions, and it is not my object to defend 
them. Yet it should be recognised that 
in his earlier career — already in the sev- 
enties his work did not sustain the early 
reputation he had justly acquired — his 


60 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN A^T. 

Style had a certain crispness, his colour 
strength, and his composition an archi- 
tectonic sense (he started life as an archi- 
tect) for the handling of masses. His 
“ High Tom, Rockland Lake,” an autum- 
nal landscape, with the placid surface 
of the lake, wooded slopes, and a weird 
light effect behind the curiously sloped 
mountain peaks, is a masterly composition, 
and for many years it served as model for 
the treatment of similar subjects. Un- 
doubtedly art has changed since Cropsey 
was elected Academician, but I am not 
so certain whether many of the younger 
men of the “Society” will not also be con- 
sidered Cropseys twenty years hence. It 
is ridiculous to be so narrow-minded as 
to believe only in one school. Why, in 
a few years, the impressionists will also 
“ be old fogies,” and lament over the in- 
consistency of art instead of their own 
visional disturbances. 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


6l 


Those men, however, who had some 
individuality to express, no matter how 
stunted it may have been, certainly stand 
out, and Cropsey is undoubtedly one of 
them. He was one of the last exponents 
of that early school of landscape painting, 
which concentrated its faculties chiefly 
upon the choice of subject. 

Only gradually our landscape painters 
began to strive for a more faithful, photo- 
graphic representation of nature, by which 
process they discovered that their tech- 
nique was absolutely insufficient for such 
a task, and they began to travel to Dussel- 
dorf, where, under the leadership of Les- 
sing, a new landscape school had sprung 
up. The exodus of our young painters 
to Germany, in the forties, was due largely 
to the popularity the productions of the 
romantic school had attained in America. 
Besides, there was no other goal for the 
art student ; Munich had only a school of 


62 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

pedantic cartoonists, while in Dusseldorf 
the technique of painting received some 
consideration, at least. 

Lessing was a man of decided abilities. 
He did not only possess the qualities 
necessary for a leader, but was a genuine 
artist. His influence on our art, however, 
was rather injurious. True enough, he 
taught our painters to draw, to make 
most scrupulous studies for each impor- 
tant picture, and to analyse minutely 
the construction of tree trunks and 
branches, of foliage and shrubbery, but 
his pictures were all painted to please 
the public, and imbued with a disagree- 
able sentimentalism, which Carlyle would 
have called “moonshine.” A few of his 
best pictures, for instance his “ Eifel- 
landscape,” possess a rare dramatic in- 
tensity, yet the light effects always 
suggest the stage. Lessing painted ideas 
like Cole, but with a more perfect tech- 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 63 

nique, and with a romantic instead of clas- 
\ sic tendency. He is also the originator 
of that peculiar green-in-green tonality, 
which may be true to nature, but which 
is hardly ever artistic in its results. I have 
dwelt at some length on the characteris- 
tics of this school, as its influence was 
very stringent ; even Inness could not 
escape it, and, in the sixties, introduced 
angels and monks, knights and pilgrims, 
chapels and shrines, into his compositions. 

In 1848 Paul Weber, one of the repre- 
sentatives of this school, came to this 
country and established himself in Phila- 
delphia, and, after refusing to paint for a 
newly established art gallery for eight dol- 
lars per week, he became one of the most 
fashionable painters of the day. He was 
a subject painter, exceedingly amiable in 
disposition, with considerable technical 
resources, and clever light effects, which 
the French would call cherche and raf- 


64 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

fine. An example of his work hangs on 
the walls of the Philadelphia Academy. 
Among his pupils were W. T. Richards, 
Schiissel, Shearer, the Hart brothers, and 
various skilful members of the painter’s 
own family. 

For twenty years or more the work of 
our painters showed the effect of the for- 
eign method. A few of them, true enough, 
possessed sufficient independence of ac- 
tion to enable them to assimilate rather 
than imitate, but the pictures made under 
the Dusseldorf influence were hardly as 
individual as those of the preceding period, 
although their workmanship had doubtless 
been improved by the foreign technique. 

Worthington Whittredge and R. M. 
Shurtleff became the faithful delineators 
of wood interiors, with the sunlight filter- 
ing through the foliage, and their pictures 
have been prominent on the walls of the 
Academy to this very day. William and 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 65 

James Hart also identified themselves with 
this vert bete movement, cattle they only 
added to their landscape in later years. 
Many others worked in the same vein, but 
their names do not need to be mentioned. 
They showed a keen perception for the 
beauties of the slopes and vales and woods 
of our rural districts, but the effect was 
generally marked by hardness and lack of 
warmth. Walter Gay (1837- ) is one 

of the few of the old school who suc- 
ceeded in shaking off the trammels of 
early art and kept themselves in line with 
the progressive spirit of our landscape art. 
His “Broad Acres,” for which he received 
the two thousand dollar prize at the com- 
petitive exhibition of the American Art 
Association in 1887, is at the Metropolitan 
Museum. The most important represen- 
tative of this school was perhaps W. L. 
Sonntag (1822-1900). He developed by 
the means of a peculiar fibrous brush work 


66 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

a style of his own. His pictures display 
an attractive vigour and freshness of 
execution. 

Besides Dusseldorf, England, in partic- 
ular the Norwich school, in which the 
weather-beaten trees, old woods, deserted 
huts, and wastes of heath of Old Crome 
were so prominent, began to exert an 
influence on our own art. Constable had 
no followers at that early date. He died in 
1837, pictures only became known 

in the forties and fifties when the Barbi- 
zon school was already flourishing. David 
Johnson, with his rich, massive brush work, 
faintly suggested the strength of the Nor- 
wich men. J. B. Bristol imitated the more 
delicate phases of their art in the dreamy 
pastoral meadows, craggy uplands, and 
dimpling lakes of our Green Mountains, 
veiled by luminous cloud effects. A. F. 
Bellows, on the other hand, attempted mi- 
nute transcripts of the idyllic side of our 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 67 

rural life. His attractive village pictures, 
in oil and aquarelle, dotted with New 
England elms and groups of figures, se- 
cured him the title of the American Birket 
Foster. Chas. H. Miller and P. V. Berry 
still represent this movement to-day. The 
former has deservedly, won a place in 
public favour. 

The greatest evil of the Diisseldorf 
movement, its false note of sentimental- 
ism, was avoided by most of the land- 
scape painters (which cannot be said of 
the figure painters, treated in another 
chapter). The American mind was too 
matter-of-fact, and too much interested in 
its country to lose itself in idle dreams. 
These two qualities gradually invested the 
artists with the power to stamp individu- 
ality of expression upon their canvases, 
and caused their successors to develop 
into the foremost landscape painters of 
the world, next to those of France. 


68 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Again another impetus was felt toward 
the middle of this century. The dis- 
covery of the gold mines of California 
was a signal for enterprise, not only to 
commerce, but also to the literature and 
to the landscape art of the United 
States. Thousands of enterprising men, 
beside themselves with excitement, at 
once started for the gold regions, down 
to the Isthmus of Panama and up along 
the western coast, or slowly moved in 
trains of wagons and ox-carts overland 
across the country. Taylor and Scott 
conquered the Pacific, the explorer Fre- 
mont pointed out the swelling ranges of 
the mountains, and our painters began to 
reveal to us the peaks of the Rocky 
Mountains, the glory of the Columbia 
River, and the wonders of the Yellow- 
stone Park. Their great compositions 
threw the people into’^an ecstasy of de- 
light, which, at this time, is difficult to 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 69 

understand. Artists like Albert Bier- 
stadt and Hill bounded, at one step, into 
popularity. 

These painters had lofty conceptions, 
but not ability sufficient to render them 
into art ; perhaps no one can master the 
scenic glories of the West. At any rate, 
it would take a sort of Michael Angelo — 
gigantic conceptions of a gigantic mind 
— to do justice to such stupendous tasks. 
The smaller pictures of these explorers of 
the West were generally by far more valu- 
able for their artistic qualities than the 
larger ones, by which they became pop- 
ular. 

Pictures like Bierstadt » “ Rocky Moun- 
tains,” Hill’s “Yosemite Valley,” and 
Thomas Moran’s “Gorge of the Yellow- 
stone ” (at the Capitol) look very much 
like gigantic chromo-lithographs to us. 

. The only technical benefit we gained 
by it was the mastery of perspective and 


70 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

a constructive power, which found its 
strongest interpreter in Thomas Moran 
(1837- ). Our Western scenery, with 

its clear atmosphere which preserves every 
aerial gradation, making it possible to see 
patches of snow on the forest line of 
mountains at a distance of ten miles, 
encouraged perspective views and a closer 
observation of the architecture of nature, 
and the whole profession profited by it. 
And that these men taught us to appre- 
ciate the beauties of our own countries is 
their final everlasting merit. It was the 
reason why we succumbed neither to the 
Dusseldorf platitudes, nor lost ourselves in 
sheer imitation of the Belgian school. 

Frederick E. Church (1826-1900), born 
at Hartford, Conn., was the first to explore 
the vastnesses of our country. And he 
did not limit himself to the West, but 
roamed through South American wilds 
as well as classic lands on the Mediter- 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


71 


ranean shores. A pupil of Cole, he has 
carried to full fruition the aspiration of 
his master, and occupied the same high 

D 

place in the second period of our land- 
scape art as the painter of “ Desolation ” 
did in the first. He also gained his first 
inspirations along the shores of the Hud- 
son and amid the beautiful regions of the 
legendary Catskills. He was infinitely 
closer to nature than his master, but she 
only interested him in her little known 
and more remarkable and startling effects. 
He had no conception whatever of the 
pay sage in time. He drew to himself 

the spoils, the riches, the splendour of 
the whole round globe, and yet all his 
pictures are noteworthy for an absence of 
sensationalism and staginess, from which 
even Inness is not always free. The only 
fault we can find with them is a somewhat 
too careful reproduction of details, which, 
however, has not prevented him from 


72 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

massing his effects to rare beauty and 
even sublimity. 

A picture like his “ Niagara” (1857) at 
the Corcoran Gallery disarms criticism. 
The green flood pours into an abyss 
veiled by mist. The sky is of a rosy 
gray, the distant shore is lined with the 
glowing tints of October foliage, and 
the ethereal vision of a rainbow unites 
heaven and earth, — indeed, a picture 
before which one can pause in pensive 
dreams. What majesty there is in the 
strangely illumined peak of the Cay- 
ambe (’58) at the Lenox Library! It 
radiates the inner light of the restless, 
ever unsatisfied soul of a genius, born at 
a time when few painters painted really 
well, and who himself, self trained as he 
was, could never overcome the technical 
weakness of his school. 

What an epic of the grander aspects 
of the external world is nevertheless his 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 73 

“ ^gean Sea ! ” What noble sympathy 
with nature is shown in this vast Claude 
Lorraine like expanse of land and water, 
in the snow-covered peaks of the distant 
mountain range, the shore dotted with 
columns and ruins of palaces, and the two 
rainbows which spurt geyser-like into the 
sky. 

True, he was not one of the masters of 
the brush, but he painted well enough to 
express with charm as well as clearness 
the impressions he received, and these 
were the impressions of a very individual 
artist. Had his growth been assisted 
by stronger outside influences, he would 
doubtlessly have reached superior tech- 
nical skill ; but something of the person- 
ality of his manner might have perished. 
So we are content with his shortcomings, 
as the verdict is still a very high one. 
W. H. Osborn, Newark, N. J., owns 
Church’s “ Chimborazo,” “ Andes of Ecua- 


74 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

dor,” “ Tropical Moonlight,” and “ ^gean 
Sea.” His “ Cotopaxi ” is at the Lenox 
Library. 

While Church taught the people to 
love beauty and to find it among the 
remotest regions, the feverx^f the Cali- 
fornia rush had not yet subsided, and it 
was the desire of every ambitious artist to 
take life into his hands and explore the 
West. Walter Shirlaw made a Western 
trip in 1859, and Thomas Moran stayed 
for many months among the titanic gorges 
of the Yellowstone River and the lurid 
splendour of its sulphurous cliffs and 
steaming geysers. The latter is a man of 
fervid imagination, and unrivalled in am- 
bitious compositions that cover a vast 
territory. His knowledge of form and 
constructive ability is quite remarkable, 
and his skill in compositions reveals it- 
self best in the black and white reproduc- 
tions of his works. His Venetian scenes 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 75 

are too Turneresque to be considered 
more than clever adaptations. 

Next to Church, Thomas Hill, of Taun- 

o 

ton. Mass., originally a coach painter, be- 
came the leading representative of this 
school. Although his wood interiors of 
Fontainebleau are perhaps his best, his 
name in the future will always be iden- 
tified with California. He became the 
painter of the Rocky Mountains and 
the Yosemite Valley, those regions 
where “ the roar of the whirlwind and 
the noise of thunder reverberated like the 
tread of the countless millions who ever- 
more moved westwards.” Hill has taken 
no liberties with his subjects, but has 
endeavoured to convey a correct impres- 
sion of the scenery. He found a worthy 
successor in W. Keith, since his twenty- 
first year a resident of San Francisco. 
One of his best pictures, “ Mount Hood, 
Oregon,” is at the Brooklyn Institute. In 


76 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

his smaller work he shows at times a good 
deal of imaginative fancy. Charles Rollo 
Peters represents the California scenery 
with a technique that shows the charac- 
teristics of current art. In his moon- 
lights he sees nature with^ie eyes of a 
poet. 

Our landscape painters had, by this 
time, become masters of drawing, con- 
struction, perspective, composition, and 
chiaroscuro, their sense of colour had 
also grown more pronounced, but their 
pictures still lacked tonality. The impor- 
tance of local values was still overlooked, 
the brush work still very monotonous, 
and the picture itself without suggestive 
qualities. 

In 1865 a collection of English water- 
colours was exhibited in New York. It 
attracted much attention, and although a 
few artists like J. M. Falconer had already 
used the medium here, this seems to have 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 77 

been the first incentive to our artists to 
devote themselves seriously to water- 
colour painting. A society headed by 

B 

sucl? men as Samuel Coleman and 
Swain Gifford was formed, and a school 
of artists, finding expression wholly in 
water-colours, like Henry Farrar, sprung 
up. 

Samuel Colman was one of our first 
painters of Oriental phenomena. He 
spent many years in Spain, Morocco, 
France, Italy, and Switzerland. His pic- 
tures were noteworthy for their sweet 
and harmonious colouring and pictur- 
esque composition. Henry Farrar be- 
longed to a little clan of artists and 
literati, including Clarence Cook and 
Charles Eliot Norton, who posed as 
Preraphaelites, although they had noth- 
ing in common with the English school 
but their loving study of details, and the 
publication of a magazine. The New 


78 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Path, in imitation of The Germ, They 
had chosen the same region which had 
inspired the first landscape school in 
America, the Catskills, as headquarters, 
and there the best work of Farrar, Chas. 
Moore, and the two Hills, father and son, 
was executed. 

About i860 the fame and the glory 
of the Barbizon school began to excite 
American artists, and under its rejuvenat- 
ing influence the Rocky Mountain school 
soon paled into insignificance. Thomas 
Moran and Hill still continued to be 
ardent partisans of this school, but with 
the exception of Keith, Horace Robbins, 
successful in seizing certain aspects of 
mountain scenery, James and George 
Smillie, with their delightful facility in 
handling colour, and a younger painter 
by the name of Parshall, who approaches 
these subjects with the spirit and treat- 
ment of the modern landscape school. 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 79 

little of note has been done during the 
last forty years. 

The new school was of an entirely dif- 
ferent character. The Hudson River and 
Rocky Mountain schools had dealt wholly 
with externals, and the subject had been 
the first and last end sought ; now nature 
itself, the poetry and mystery of its simpler 
moods, became the leading motive of our 
landscape art. 

Michel, Millet, Rousseau, Dupre, and 
Corot, each having a style that can be 
distinguished at the first glance, had one 
trait in common. They sought to sug- 
gest the symbolical meaning which the 
human mind associates with the aspects 
of hills and skies, of autumnal woods and 
lonely ponds and moorlands fading into 
space. They saw in nature moods in 
sympathy with the human soul. 

There were two men who painted land- 
scapes in a way which could hardly be 


8o A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

understood at that period, when size was 
one of the implements to success, Elihu 
Vedder and A. P. Ryder. The first was 
in his early landscapes more of a painter 
than ever afterward, when his canvases 
gained more and more an illustrative qual- 
ity. Compositions like “ The Refuge ” are 
full of deep suggestions and weird attempts 
in psychology of colour. Ryder, although 
largely known as an interpreter of the 
poetic in paint, has achieved many of his 
earlier successes in landscapes. One must 
gaze at his “ Lowlands near Highbridge ’’ 
to know how well he understood how to 
endow a single subject with rare suggest- 
iveness. Another picture I remember 
represents an old country house with 
light glowing in the casements. They 
are notable for their mellowness of tone 
and severity of composition. In many 
of his recent paintings the landscape also 
plays the most prominent part, but pure 



Veduek. — Landscape. 



OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 83 

landscapes are becoming rather rare with 

him. The last to leave his studio was his 

\ 

“ Forest of Arden,” finished in 1897. 

These two men represented the imagi- 
native landscape, which only existed in 
their own fancies. The true artist, unlike 
the commonplace painter, who shows 
us things that we have seen and felt 
in the same way ourselves, selects more 
subtle and yet more typical facts, ex- 
plains them with poetic fervour, shows 
us things which we have probably not 
noticed before, and makes them for ever 
ours. But this can also be accomplished 
by a more truthful and poetical render- 
ing of local scenery; at this task Jervis 
McEntee (1828-91). put himself. His 
gray melancholy autumnal scenes, wild 
reaches of russet woodland, with skurry- 
ing clouds, are true to nature, and, at the 
same time, a reflection of his tempera- 
ment. His art sings in a low minor key. 


84 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

that finds response in our heart. His 
compositions have already that harmony 
of line and masses which distinguishes 
the Barbizon school. To the left, in the 
middle distance, a pond, bordered by two 
trees with autumn foliage, two smaller 
masses of shrubbery of similar shape, as 
accompaniment, behind it wooded ranges 
which slope down to the right affording a 
vista of the sky ; to the right, in the fore- 
ground, some vegetation sprinkled with 
flowers, from which a defoliated tree rises 
in an oblique line against the sky. That 
is an example of his style of composition. 
His outlines, modelling, local colours were 
still far from perfect, but the general effect 
of his elegies of falling leaves was a de- 
cided advance toward perfection. The 
disagreeable green at last began to dis- 
appear from the canvases. Landscape 
art consisted, as Edmond About wrote, 
“ in choosing well a bit of country, and 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 85 

painting it as it is, enclosing in its frame 
all the naive and simple poetry which it 
contains.” " Hamilton Hamilton painted 
his woodland scenes with cattle browsing 
in the rich meadows, Swain Gifford his 
picturesque views of the Massachusetts 
coast, and Donoghue Rogers depicted au- 
tumnal forest scenes at times with such 
poetic truth that our ears seemed filled 
with the soft rustling of the leaves. 

Paris now became the centre of attrac- 
tion, and the advantages our landscape 
art gained thereby were shown in two 
artists, W. L. Picknell and Charles H. 
Davis, who were competent technicians. 
W. L. Picknell (1853-97) strove for brutal 
truth, he joined the school of open-air 
workers, and painted his pictures directly 
from nature. His “ On the Borders of the 
Marsh” — a November day in a Brittany 
field, with the characteristic gnarled trees, 
overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, and 


86 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the broad earthen fences peculiar to that 
region — is most vigorous in its treatment, 
and peculiar for the way in which he 
encrusted the surface of the picture with 
thick lumps of paint. Later on he modi- 
fied this crude appearance of his brush 
work, and in his “ Road to Concarneau,” 
which attracted great attention at the 
Paris Exhibition of 1880, and “ In Cali- 
fornia,” it is entirely subordinated to his 
sole desire of depicting nature just as it 
is. To suggest anything beyond topo- 
graphical and atmospheric truths lay 
beyond his powers. He excels in the 
illusion which he can give of reality; and 
his beach scenes, white sand basking in 
the glowing sun, impress at the first 
glance like reality itself. 

Charles H. Davis (1856- ) is his very 

antipode. He also cares for reality, but 
it is not his principal aim ; on the con- 
trary, he subordinates it entirely to those 



From u Copley rnut. — Copyright, iSlil), by Curtis & 



OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 89 

qualities which arouse sentiment in the 
spectator. He wants his pictures of 
Night and Twilight to impress like night 
and twilight itself. At the Paris Annual 
Exhibition of 1878 he covered himself 
with glory with his four pictures, “ Un 
Soir d’Hiver,” “ Le Soir apres L’Orage,” 
“ Le Versant de la Colline,” and “ La 
Vallee en le Soir;” in particular the 
latter one, which represented a green 
valley, invaded by the all-encroaching 
gloom of twilight, with a white cloud 
stealing softly over the expanse of ver- 
dure. The melancholy of stillness and 
the mystery of night are perfectly ren- 
dered. His pictures are at once realistic 
and lyrical, and infused with the same 
emotions that they provoke in the soul 
of the spectators. He proved himself a 
strong personality, and gave promise to 
be one of our greatest landscapists. His 
later work, more realistic and less lyrical, 


90 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 


which he now and then sends forth from 
his reclusory in Mystic, Conn., hardly 
comes up to the work by which we know 
him best : his “ Late Afternoon ” at the 
New York Union League Club, “The 
Brook ” at the Philadelphia Academy, 
and the “Evening” at the Metropolitan 
Museum. 

A decided step in advance was made 
by A. H. Wyant (1836-92), born at Port 
Washington, Ohio. Less subjective and 
morbid than McEntee, but moved by 
similar motives, Wyant displayed a sym-- 
pa thy with nature and a masterful skill 
in depicting subtle effects which place 
him among the first landscape painters 
of the age. In the suggestive rendering 
of space and colour, of the multitudinous 
phases of a bit of waste land, or mountain 
glen, or sedgy brook-side, simple enough 
at first sight, but full of infinite unob- 
trusive beauty, he was unsurpassed. His 



i 

1 


WvANT. — On the Beaver. 




OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


93 


pictures are equally distinguished by 
truth, vigour, and delicacy, and by their 
breadth of feeling and poetic treatment. 

There is a spirit in Wyant’s pictures 
akin to that found in Corot’s works, 
noticeably in the vague melancholy and 
dreamy tenderness, a reflection of the 
inner life of the artist, which pervades 
the multitude of details, he managed to 
introduce without harming the central 
and prevailing idea. He was the direct 
outcome of the paysage intime and one of 
its truest exponents. Occasionally his 
work shows traces of foreign influence, 
principally Dupre and Corot, but he was 
an artist of too much original power, a 
too careful observer of nature, to have 
been under any necessity to stunt himself 
by the imitation of another artist, however 
great. He struck with marvellous preci- 
sion the point between the real and ideal, 
where we still accept a picture as a 


94 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 


faithful transcript of nature and yet are 
charmed b}^ its poetic suggestiveness. 
His dexterity of handling, however, did 
not always suffice. Several of his pic- 
tures can be seen at the Metropolitan 
Museum. 


In the meanwhile, George Inness 
(1825-97), who is generally considered 
our greatest landscape painter, and which 
honour he undoubtedly shares with 
Homer Martin and D. W. Tryon, had 
bravely struggled for recognition. In 
1875, at the age of fifty, he was still un- 
known. At last in about 1878 he began 
to be appreciated, whereupon he rapidly 
climbed the ladder of fame. His pictures 
brought enormous prices, and the rapidity 
with which their value increased can best 
be noticed in his “ A Gray Lowery Day,” 
which he sold for three hundred dollars in 
1879, and which was purchased by Henry 
Sampson, Esq., for $10,150 in 1889. 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


95 


Inness was born at Newburgh, N. Y. 
He was a pupil of Regis Gignoux, a 
Frenchman who had a great admiration 
for the Barbizon school. In 1846 Inness 
set himself up in a studio in New York, 
and in 1850 went abroad, where he became 
acquainted with Corot and Rousseau, and 
enjoyed for a time the close companion- 
ship of Millet. 

The paintings of his youth bore the 
marks of the Hudson River school ; they 
look pedantic and laboured, and are over- 
crowded with details. Only now and 
then a burst of light revealed the genius 
struggling for expression. His second 
style seems to have caused him great 
difficulties; there is a period in which 
his genius was under a cloud, when he 
chose various of his popular contem- 
poraries as his models. From these 
recollections and uncertainties he freed 
himself only gradually, learning step by 


g6 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

step to seek inspiration in himself alone. 
The latter period is the only one which 
interests the art critic. 

A visit to the gallery of R. H. Halsted, 
which was sold at auction in 1892, was a 
revelation to every art lover. In the 
works of no other artist do we find such 
feeling for the poetry of our country and 
perfection of representation united to the 
same degree. With admirable drawing he 
combined a knowledge of chiaroscuro in 
its most multifarious aspects, a colouring 
powerful and warm, and a mastery of the 
brush which, while never too smooth on 
the surface, ranges from the tenderest, 
most minute touch to the broadest, freest, 
and most liquid execution. His work was 
always very uneven, because he was first 
of all an artist who made use of his land- 
scapes to express his own moods and 
dreams ; he put in them his own feelings, 
like Homer Martin, only the latter was a 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


97 


painter of his own bitterness and weari- 
ness of life which he managed at times to 
transfer into a style of beauty and repose, 
while Inness made his picture reflect 
more the mental condition, the imagin- 
ings derived from the study of other arts. 
He expressed through landscapes those 
obscure but powerful emotions which, for 
want of a better term, we call the dramatic 
in art. 

He delighted especially in represent- 
ing a wide expanse of land, which was 
always a trait of the best of American 
landscapes. He had the widest range of 
subjects at his command, he was inter- 
ested in every phase of scenery, he loved 
every season and every hour of the day, 
and grew enthusiastic over every aspect 
of nature, from the simplest to the most 
startling phenomena. The titles, of his 
pictures, “ Georgia Pines,” “ Sunset on the 
Passaic,” “The Wood Gatherer,” “After 


g8 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

a Summer Shower,” “ The Delaware Val- 
ley,” “ Winter Morning at Montclair,” etc., 
show best the variety of his subjects. His 
art is rather difficult to study now ; form- 
erly it was owned by a few men like 
Messrs. Clark, Halsted, etc., but lately has 
been considerably scattered, the public 
galleries having but little to show of his 
best work. 

Unlike McEntee, who, whenever he in- 
troduced figures into his landscapes, repre- 
sented them as struggling against some 
unrelenting destiny, Inness used them 
merely as incidents, as parts of the whole- 
ness of nature. He was most attracted by 
idyllic scenes and the calmer moods of 
nature, and, although he needed threaten- 
ing skies and wild tempests to give full 
play to his dramatic temperament, he care- 
fully avoided all sinister appalling spec- 
tacles, from which, if encountered in 
reality, one might flee with a shudder of 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


99 


horror and alarm. The note of sublimity 
was very seldorn sounded in our landscape 
art, and then only in scenes of silent and 
peaceful grandeur. 

Inness idealised all his creations with 
his magical light effects. Such deep 
luminous lights had never been seen 
before on American canvases. 

Ever since the sixties he poured over 
all his canvases a dazzling radiance, 
which at times seems almost unearthly. 
His pictures glow with strange and noble 
harmonies, of the sun struggling through 
clouds after a shower of rain, with rain- 
bows of ineffable beauty, with the glow 
of chariots of fire that race through the 
evening sky. 

He worked like a virtuoso, always 
trying to realise the original inspiration 
in one daring effort, which he usually 
carried to a certain state of perfection, 
and if it did not please him in that state. 


lOO A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

he did not start over again, but at once 
tackled a new idea. He did not allow 
himself the time to work on one canvas 
for years, slowly maturing the idea. His 
ardent temperament was always in the 
search for something new, and this fever- 
ish haste often made his work appear 
melodramatic, and induced him to apply 
mannerisms of glazing and scumbling 
bright colour over darker ones, which 
otherwise might have been avoided. 

Few have carried the landscape to such 
a pitch of art as has George Inness. He 
became in his old age a marvellously 
dexterous painter, especially proficient in 
rendering sunlight with a brilliancy never 
surpassed. Then he became a master of 
atmosphere, in which he had been merely 
great before, and added the poetry of 
colour to the perfection of drawing. 

But the last word had not yet been 
said. Our landscape art was still in the 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


lOI 


ascent, and Homer Martin and D. W. 
Tryon were the men who brought it to its 
highest pinnacle of perfection. The in- 
novation of impressionism, however, was 
necessary toward this steady progress. 
Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissaro 
had painted their mosaics of open-air 
tones. For years they had had no other 
outlet for their works than the gallery of 
Durand-Ruel, when at last, about 1885, 
the public began to find them “ less bad.” 
A visit to one of their exhibitions was like 
stepping out of a room into the sun. 
Colours of such violence and vibrating 
joy had never been seen before. One felt 
as if standing in the midst of a fire, with 
lambent flames on all sides. Painting 
had been blind, and now opened its eyes 
for the first time. It had lived in dark- 
ness, and now suddenly saw the sun 
rising. 

And these colour-orgies triumphantly 


102 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

entered the studios of all countries, and 
proved a particular stimulant to landscape 
painting, by heightening the “ key ” of all 
succeeding productions. The Americans 
were quick in recognising the merits of this 
movement, but it remained^ore or less 
an experiment with them. They adopted 
neither the dots of the pomtillists^ put on 
in huge wafers, the pear-shaped spots of 
the poirists, the commas of Monet, the 
streaks of Besnard, nor the cross-hatchings 
of Raffaelli, but modified one or the other 
method, or a combination of several to 
their special use. Enneking, the late 
Jacob Wagner, E. Barnard, and Hayden, 
of Boston, Shearer, of Philadelphia, Taylor, 
E. Lawson, Meteyard, and W. Robinson 
are some of the disciples of impressionism, 
whom I have encountered in this country. 

Childe Hassam applies at times the 
genuine Monet technique to great advan- 
tage. He is undoubtedly our foremost 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. IO3 

impressionist since the decease of Theo- 
dore Robinson. 

Theodore Robinson (1852-96) was 
strictly termed a neo-impressionist. He 
accepted the innovation of colour, light, 
and moving life, and the impressionist 
theory that the first consciousness we re- 
ceive of~an object consists of a confusion 
of colour dots. But he painted merely in 
prismatic colour strokes, varying in size 
according to the subject. A broad mass 
of colour seemed opaque to him, and 
only a juxtaposition of pure colour spots 
capable of vibration and life. He spent 
the years 1884-88 with Monet, at Gi- 
verney, and then returned to this country, 
devoting himself to the Delaware and 
Hudson River Canal scenery. What 
correct, accomplished prose that man 
wrote with his brush ! One has only to 
look at his “ A Bridge ” at John Gellatly’s 
gallery, at the exquisite nude in the pos- 


104 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

session of Doctor Kelsey, N. Y., at his 
“In the Sunlight” at the Grand Union 
Hotel, N. Y., and his “ Hudson River 
Canal,” refused by the Metropolitan Mu- 
seum, to which it was offered as a gift. 
How concise he was in his mannerisms, 
and what vital studies he painted with 
his sick and wasted body, for he was an 
incurable invalid. He executed no com- 
monplace transcripts of nature, but can- 
vases which glow and vibrate with nature 
itself, or, in other words, pictures which 
give one the same impression that a real 
sunlight scene does at the first glance. 
He was the most robust craftsman of this 
school we have had in America. 

A peculiar phenomenon in our art is 
presented by Maria a Becket, who, in 
moods of religious ecstasy, with so in- 
tense an energy as to raise blisters at her 
finger-tips, paints impressionistic sketches 
which would have gained her a reputation 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. IO5 

in Europe long ago. Although she is of 
frail build, she has the vigorous touch of a 
man. After having associated with men 
like Homer Martin, W. M. Hunt, and 
Daubigny, she invented a pallet-knife 
style of her own, in which she slaps on 
pure colours in a wild improvisatore fash- 
ion. Her range of subjects embraces all 
zones and atmospheric phenomena. Her 
strongest pictures, however, depict live- 
oaks spreading their vast arms like 
groined arches of Gothic cathedrals, fes- 
tooned with the mystically trailing folds 
of the Spanish moss, along the lagoons of 
the South, with water so truly realistic in 
its effect that one is tempted to dip one’s 
finger into it. She seldom exhibits, but 
various art lovers and critics have been 
attracted by her work. 

The Manet impressionism of seeing 
things flat, as broad masses, has also 
influenced our landscape art considerably. 


Io6 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Henri, Redfield, Schofield have painted 
landscapes in that fashion. 

To Manet and Monet, and above all else 
to Millet, who transferred landscapes back 
into the black, rough soil of reality, we owe 
the present frugality in the choice of sub- 
jects. The simplest rural scenes, such as 
fields and meadows, the corner of a gar- 
den, a vista through woodland, old or- 
chards and humble country homes, an old 
fence or a clump of trees, a lonesome road, 
or a row of trees against the luminous sky, 
etc., are sufficient to serve as mediums for 
expressing the beauties of nature “ as seen 
through an artist’s temperament.” 

The singular blending of original ex- 
pression with a conscious or uncon- 
scious tendency to copy contemporary 
foreign style and methods, is still ram- 
pant, although the more serious men are 
succeeding more and more in freeing 
themselves from such an influence. Land- 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


107 


scape painting is undoubtedly the most 
popular branch of our art, and the one 
most encouraged by the dealers. A for- 
eign artist is said to have once remarked 
at an Academy exhibition : “ Why, it 
seems to me that American artists paint 
nothing but landscapes.” And it really 
impresses one so. Every exhibit contains 
landscapes of all styles, from Gainsbor- 
oughs down to Gazins, imitations or adap- 
tations. And any amount of diluted 
Diaz’, Dupres, Corots, and Rousseaus. 
The canvases of R. C. Minor, Julian Rix, 
and H. W. Ranger almost in every instance 
bear reminiscences of the Barbizon school. 
They know every trick of the trade, and 
their work impresses one as being de- 
cidedly too clever. Ranger’s “ Morning 
at Highbridge,” however, is a picture of 
considerable solidity and breadth. The 
pictures of Appleton Browne, simple bits 
of nature in greenish gray, always remind 


Io8 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

one somewhat of Corot, due to a long ser- 
vitude to this poet of the brush. 

We may regard R. A. Blakelock 
(1847- ) as a direct descendant of Rous- 

seau. He had a strong p^onality, how- 
ever, a,nd his peculiar canvases, painted 
with a skewer such as the butchers use, 
blackened with madness and illumined 
with a weird tearful moonlight, — insuffi- 
cient as they may be in many respects, 
— are at least the original expression of a 
soul. 

Besides these imitators there are a num- 
ber of men who excel only in one phase 
of nature, which never grows uninterest- 
ing even if reproduced in a hundred vari- 
ations. In the case of J. J. Enneking, of 
Boston, it is the representation of autum- 
nal forest land behind which the sun is 
setting in a fierce glow of red and orange 
colours ; with Bolton Jones the melancholy 
poetry that pervades autumnal scenery; 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


109 


and with J. F. Murphy the passion for 
desolate wind-tossed plains shrouded in 
storm-laden clouds. 

Water-colour painting enjoys great pop- 
ularity. Many of our leading men, like 
Winslow Homer, Shirlaw, La Farge, F. S. 
Church, and the majority of our landscap- 
ists, in particular A. Schilling and Horatio 
Walker, are as successful in aquarelle as 
in oil, but make no specialty of it. The 
large bulk of water-colours, however, serve 
strictly commercial ends. The work of 
comparatively few water-colourists is char- 
acterised by any individuality or strength. 
If we mention the names of S. P. R. 
Triscott, Sears Gallagher, and Ross 
Turner, all three New England artists, 
C. C. Curran, Albert Herter, A. E. 
Sterner, W. L. Lathrop, Clara McChes- 
ney, and Rhoda Holmes Nichols, who 
has often proved herself a master in this 
medium, we have all but exhausted the 


no A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

subject. There are two men, however, 
who have something special to say. H. 
B. Snell is our foremost water-colourist. 
Thoroughly original, pure and delicate in 
tone, he makes us feel in his pictures 
something of the intensity mth which he 
is himself impressed by nature. What 
would an exhibition be without his deli- 
cate colour harmonies and subtle poetical 
fancies ? He once said to me : “ I do not 
quite understand your clamour for high 
art ; I am not in it.” That was very mod- 
est of a man who is decidedly “ in it,” and 
in this particular branch of art almost 
alone in it. If life were not so short, and 
its interests so manifold, I could gaze for 
hours at pictures like “ A Cove,” a quiet 
nook formed of stalwart rocks, crowned 
with a sunlit plain cradling a sheet of 
water, on which a dim sail is drifting, or 
at his “ Moonlight ” (both exhibited at the 
New York Water Colour Society, 1898), a 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


I I I 


marvellous skyscape over a simple cottage, 
all bathed m a silvery fairylike colour. C. 
A. Needham (1844- ), ‘also active as a 

landscape and street-scene painter, is an- 
other expert water-colourist. A few trees 
reflected in a pool of water, a sloping hill, 
some shrubbery, and a sky faintly flushed 
with blue or rose, suffice him to suggest 
both poetry and mystery. The chief char- 
acteristic of his style is a love for beau- 
tiful colour. Every work of his brush 
reveals an originality of artistic expression, 
alike in composition and decorative effect. 
In his smallest sketches there are always 
noticeable qualities of colour, and an im- 
pression so true and broad as to never fail 
to recall nature. For melody and grace of 
conception and execution Needham’s art 
stands almost unique. In his most recent 
work the colour is almost too sombre and 
the majestic quality still moi'e pronounced. 

The Japanese influence can be traced 


1 12 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

in the work of Sargent Kendall, whose 
sketches have all the characteristics of 
Japanese landscape art without possess- 
ing its proud virtue, the power of sugges- 
tiveness, and J. H. Twachtman, whose 
atmospheric effects have a distinction of 
tone and a delicacy of colour comparing 
favourably with the exquisite colouring 
of Hiroshige. He perpetuates the spirit, 
the depths of atmosphere, the light, the 
movement, the exquisite feeling of pulsat- 
ing nature, particularly in those moods 
where sharp details are merged into more 
tender harmonies. A. B. Dow, who draws 
American landscapes in the manner in 
which an artist of Old Japan might have 
drawn them, will be commented upon at 
length in another chapter. 

Among the artists who have a special 
fondness for line composition and the 
vastness of nature are Stephen Parrish, 
L. Ochtman, and C. A. Platt (i86i- ). 





Tvvachtman. — The Poplars. 




OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. II5 

Stephen Parrish excels in winter scenes 
and the misty, dreary, drowsy side of 
nature. Ochtman, whom George Inness 
admired and predicted a future for, is an 
artist of brilliant parts, and one who, al- 
though sometimes inclined to sensation- 
alism, has undoubtedly created some 
splendid compositions. My favourite, 
however, is C. A. Platt. His landscapes 
are true observations of nature, with a 
decided touch of poetic feeling, dreamlike 
and gilded with classicism. These men 
have a certain preciseness of treatment in 
common, that gives dignity to their spa- 
cious landscapes, which, however, lack 
warmth of feeling, and, at times, look 
rather empty. 

Among the men whom it is more or 
less difficult to classify are many who, 
without attaining the highest rank, give 
us much that is pleasing, much that is 
poetic, and occasionally some examples of 


Il6 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the first order. A man who stands out 
distinctly is Morgan Mcllhenny (1858- ). 
We feel at once here is a man behind the 
canvas. He is inspired by the quiet tones 
of gray days in fields and meadowlands, 
and understands how to imbue the sim- 
plest scenes with a certain idyllic feeling. 
He struggles very hard for expression, he 
lacks freedom and strength, yet what a 
delicious silvery tone can be found in 
some of his pictures. Another man of 
merit was the late Charles Linford, of Phil- 
adelphia, who took Diaz for his model 
and then went out-of-doors and composed 
his pictures, going from place to place, 
now setting his easel up for a tree or a 
road, then for a fence, etc., until the pic- 
ture was finished. His greens were very 
vigorous, and his use of bitumen was 
exceedingly skilful. Boston has two land- 
scapists of decided talent: C. H. Wood- 
bury, fond of choosing his subjects from 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. II7 

the rolling sand-dunes of New England, 
although he is equally successful in other 
subjects, with a preference, however, for 
undulating land ; and C. E. L. Greene, an 
earnest and enthusiastic worker, by far too 
little known, whose pictures show a vigor- 
ous, free handling, a fine conception of 
colour, and a delicacy of feeling that places 
him among our leading landscape painters. 

Among the landscapists whom we can 
study at the regular art exhibitions are 
Charles W. Eaton, who always manages 
to paint a pleasing picture and to appear 
poetical ; W. M. Chase, whose landscapes 
of the Shinnecock hills sometimes con- 
tain delightful passages; Lungren, who 
explores the sedge deserts of Arizona; 
J. A. Prichard, the depicter of wild-flower 
life, with backgrounds of trees that remind 
one of temples and sacred woods; G. H. 
Dearth, favourably known for his wood- 
scenes and sand-dunes in bluish twilight 


Il8 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

tones, shimmering with the light of the 
afterglow ; Arthur Parton, who in former 
years depicted some of the sober effect of 
our gray November "days, but who, lately, 
like Homer Lee and Charles A. Need- 
ham, in his more realistic moods, has been 
searching for picturesque bits around New 
York. His “ Palisades in Winter” deserve 
special praise. 

There are many more, who devote their 
lives with enthusiasm to the pursuit of 
landscape painting, but it would be an 
impossible task to^mention all. Among 
the younger men, however, there are four 
who seem to challenge attention, for the 
fact that, although they have not yet 
developed a distinct style of their own, 
they seem to possess sufficient individual- 
ity and skill to accomplish the task, and 
may, perhaps, be destined to play an im- 
portant part in the future development of 
our landscape art. They are F. de Haven, 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. II9 

W. L. Lathrop, F. Kost, and Alexander 
Schilling. 

F. de Haven (1856- ), in his earlier 

career, possessed exquisite tone quality, 
lately he strives more for colour and dra- 
matic intensity. His subjects are simple 
and poetical : the last glow of the sun, a 
windy day, a threatening sky, or struggling 
clouds throwing: a stream of lig:ht on the 
plain, etc., furnish the principal themes of 
his pictures. 

F. Kost (1861- ), whose canvases 

were formerly aglow with radiant colours, 
has sobered down to gray harmonies, and 
in this process also simplified his compo- 
sitions. His latest pictures of Buzzard’s 
Bay, with seaweed gatherers at work, large 
canvases, with the immensity of the sea, 
and the beach lying under a gray sky, with 
only a man and a cart at the water’s edge, 
have a strength and directness which 
show clearly, that Kost is one of the few 


120 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. ' 

men who endeavour to depict nature as 
they see her through their own eyes, fresh 
and ever variable. 

Another master of simplicity is W. L. 
Lathrop, (1859- ), the poet of exquisite 

green and gray gradations, who only 
needs a strip of wind-blown marshes, a 
solitary house on a hill, and a row of 
defoliated trees against the sky to reflect 
a colour mood of nature. His pictures 
lately show more colour and a more 
poetical choice of subjects, but he is less 
successful in these attempts, and will un- 
doubtedly return to simpler phases of 
nature. 

Alexander Schilling (1859- ), though 

originally an artist of decided individu- 
ality and originality of conception, had 
the misfortune to become too closely 
connected with the style of two other 
men he admired. Being a skilful etcher, 
circumstances forced him to devote four 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


I2I 


years of his life to the making of two 
reproductive etchings after Tryon and 
Horatio Walker, and ever since he has 
been unable to free his art from their 
influence. Notwithstanding which, he 
has something to say — something that 
comes from the heart of the man, — and 
as soon as he has found his own self 
again he will produce work of lasting 
value. Though as a rule not partial to 
prophecies, in this case I venture one, be- 
cause I know of no talent better equipped 
or more symmetrical among the younger 
landscape painters of America. 

If they really aspire to the foremost 
rank, the task they have before them 
seems gigantic, for they would be obliged 
to surpass the two greatest landscape 
painters America has hitherto produced, 
Homer Martin and Tryon. 

Homer Martin (1836-97), born at Al- 
bany, N. Y., was a direct descendant of 


122 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the melancholy muse which urged Jervis 
McEntee to pursue inaccessible ideals. 
Like him, he makes use of landscapes to 
express his own bitterness and weariness ; 
he contemplated nature with a dreaming 
sadness, and created groves and mountain 
recesses in which he could hide his mel- 
ancholy broodings. But he was too gen- 
uine a poet of the brush to remain solely 
subjective. 

Among the monotonous dunes of New- 
port, in the solitudes of the Mississippi 
valley, as well as at the foot of the Adiron- 
dack Mountains, he tried, prey to a secret 
but gnawing inquietude, to grasp the 
soul with which the pantheists endow 
nature. The faint and fugitive lights 
which flit across his canvases are the 
image not so much of his own soul but 
that of humanity. No one ever reflected 
like him with a ray of struggling light 
the solemn agitation of a human mind 



Martin. — Harp of the Winds. 



OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 1 25 

in quest of the unknown, aspiring from 
things visible toward the infinite. 

Technically his work was still more 
uneven than Inness’, he was entirely sub- 
ject to inspirations. He seldom reached 
the desired end, and many of his can- 
vases were consequently failures. But in 
pictures like the “ Harp of the Winds,” the 
“ Sand Dunes ” at the Metropolitan Mu- 
seum, the “ Newport Neck ” at the Lotus 
Club, New York, there is absolute free- 
dom, freshness, and originality. They 
startle us by their intimacy with nature, 
the strength and immensity which they 
perfectly suggest, and their wealth of 
subdued colour. 

He seemed to have less feeling for 
form, but his mastery of atmosphere 
and indefinite distances and his peculiar 
rich schemes of colour — which is the 
more astonishing as his eyesight had 
been always very bad, in particular since 


126 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

1892 — will make his name one to be 
remembered for ever in the world of 
art, as one of the classics of American 
landscape painting. 

The memorial exhibition of his work 
at the Century Club (’97) was complete 
enough to enforce that conclusion. How 
that man has toiled, how faithfully he has 
struggled to perfect himself, and what 
strides he has actually made from the 
“ Naturanschauung ” of the Hudson River 
School and the Kensett style with its 
melting and subtle gradation of pure 
thin colour in the early sixties, to the 
lurid sentimentalism of the early eighties ; 
and from these the steady ascent to the 
masterpieces of eight or ten years ago, 
with their rich and ruddy colouring, 
their lineal and constructive beauty, their 
solid technical resources, their intimate 
knowledge of nature in her calm and 
dreamy moods; and finally his latest 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 1 27 

work where merely a road along a hill- 
side and a defoliated tree or a waste of 
land with a rock formation were necessary 
to him to express with profound sim- 
plicity the heroic harmonies of nature. 
He felt like his own flesh and blood 
the animating forces of the humid soil, 
the spirituality of trees, and the revela- 
tions of light in the ever changing 
atmosphere. His sympathy with these 
aspects of nature almost amounted to 
idolatry. 

Much further landscape painting can- 
not go. It was, however, left to Dwight 
\V. Tryon (1849- ) to embellish it with 

two other qualities, the subtleties of Jap- 
anese art and the musical suggestiveness 
which was introduced into mural painting 
by Chavannes. 

Looking at a picture of Inness, we still 
argue in our mind, “ He meant to rep- 
resent such and such a scene under 


128 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

such and such circumstances;” before 
a Homer Martin, one realises at once 
its meaning and says to oneself, “ It rep- 
resents fall and the weird melancholy 
of a human soul;” but before a Tryon, 
one simply feels as if looking at na- 
ture herself. Its vague harmonies drift 
quickly and irresistibly into one’s soul. 

Tryon was born at Hartford, Conn. 
He studied with Daubigny and Har- 
pignies, and was awarded the Webb 
Prize for his “First Leaves,” at the Society 
of American Artists in 1889. At first he 
painted very much like his French mas- 
ters, but having the gift of delicate ob- 
servation and absolute surety of the eye, 
he made rapid strides toward perfection, 
and his style appeared already mature 
when he received the first class medal 
for his “ Rising Moon,” at the Munich In- 
ternational Exhibition of 1892. In reality 
he had arrived only at a period of transi- 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. I2Q 

tion. His pictures still revealed a distinct 
poetic thought, not unlike Cazin’s earlier 
work, for instance, “ La Village Morte,’' 
and “ A Cottage Lost in the Solitudes of 
Picardy.” Dissatisfied with these early 
triumphs, he set himself the task of 
fathoming the psychological qualities of 
colour, the sentiment and poetry they are 
capable of suggesting, in short, their 
musical charm. He persistently strove 
for the subtlest nuances and most fugitive 
moments of nature. His magic brush 
leads us to silent meadow-lands and 
straw-coloured fields, where human life 
seems extinct and only long rows of trees 
lift their barren branches into dawn ; to 
the hushed mystery of a sleeping pond or 
a wandering river reflecting the eternal 
riddle of existence; to lonesome, snow- 
bound marshes, with a few faint lights 
shining through tree trunks and wind- 
worn shrubbery; or into classic orchards 


130 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

where apple-trees in blossom seem to 
drop “large and melodious thoughts.” 
These simple subjects Tryon moulds 
into simple repetitions of horizontal lines, 
embroidered with the fretwork of details, 
into nameless nuances of colours, fragrant 
in their vitality and yet so fragile that the 
ordinary eye can hardly distinguish and 
appreciate them. He masters, like no 
one else, the uncertain tonalities of dawn 
and twilight. With works of art it should 
be very much as with human beings, they 
should possess a soul, an individuality, a 
certain something which can not be mate- 
rially grasped, but which produces in the 
sympathetic spectator feelings, similar to 
those the artist felt in his creative mo- 
ments. Tryon’s pictures have this to a 
rare degree. They are almost, literally 
speaking, musical in their effect, not un- 
like the pizzicato notes on the A string 
of a violin. 



Tryon. — Spring. 



OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 


Tryon’s method of work is particularly 
interesting. Seven months of the year, at 
least, he spends on his farm at South 
Dartmouth, Mass. During this time he 
never paints, he simply absorbs the beau- 
ties of New England scenery and takes 
mental notes. Also during the winter 
months, in his New York studio, he lives 
a very retired life, caring for no com- 
panionship save his painting, which oc- 
cupies him as long as daylight lingers, 
and there and then he tries to realise in 
paint the accumulated mental 'notes. At 
the start he is an impressionist. What 
he considers a sketch many landscapists 
would consider a finished picture. They 
contain all the vitality, the robustness, 
bravura strokes of the first impression. 
Then he begins to work, to touch up 
and break the surface, perfect the con- 
struction of leading lines, to drag and 
stipple with nervous touches until his 


134 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

ideal is realised. And — what is most 
marvellous — the finished picture still pos- 
sesses the original strength of the sketch, 
only muffled, as it were, by the mist of 
dreams. 

He composes his pictures as a com- 
poser does his score. His parallelism of 
horizontal and vertical lines is like mel- 
odic phrasing. And it seems as if his 
objects were shaped and massed to com- 
plete each other, to harmonise like accords. 
He has done for landscape painting the 
same thing which Chavannes did for mural 
painting. His contribution to the use of 
parallelism in pictorial art is enormous. 
Here the Japanese might pause and learn 
new lessons. He is, however, less a com- 
poser of space than Chavannes ; he pre- 
fers the rhythms of sharp curves and 
broken undulations. Chavannes com- 
poses at largo; Tryon restricts himself to 
andantes and adagios. 


OUR LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. 1 35 

Tryon has often been criticised for his 
limited range of subjects. “ They are like 
song composers” (referring to Dewing and 
Tryon) “who excel in a simple little mel- 
ody and never tire of repeating it,” a 
painter once remarked to rne. This is 
hardly just; few seem to realise how 
much strength is really necessary for such 
moderation. Tryon attempts only what 
he can master. 

To appreciate fully how perfect Tryon’s 
art really is, one has to visit the House of 
Freer, Detroit, where his pictures are 
shown to the best advantage. The whole 
interior decoration is in harmony with the 
Tryons, De wings, Abbott Thayers, Whis- 
tlers, F. S. Church’s, and numerous Japan- 
ese kakemonos of which the collection' ex- 
clusively consists. Tryon has reached 
the calm perfection of Japanese art. The 
great power of the artist, who stands alone 
among his brother painters for delicacy of 


136 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

work and a singular superiority of educa- 
tion, lies in the very moderation which 
guides all his efforts, and which has al- 
ways been one of the leading characteris- 
tics of art, when it approached perfection. 


CHAPTER III. 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 

N the year 1828 the National 
Academy of Design held its first 
exhibition. In the same year 
Gilbert Stuart died. These two events, 
occurring at the same time, mark the 
close of one period and the beginning of 
another. 

The new institution tried to furnish 
thorough opportunities for art instruction, 
to give annual exhibitions, and to estab- 
lish a permanent art gallery; the latter 
project was soon abandoned, the other 
two were strictly carried out. Samuel 
F. B. Morse, an artist of ability, but better 

137 



138 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

known as the inventor of the electric 
telegraph, was its first president. 

Besides the three landscape painters, 
Cole, Doughty, and Durand, mentioned 
in the preceding chapter, three other 
artists were particularly active in the 
development of our native art, namely, 
Henry Inman, Chester Harding, and 
Robert W. Weir. 

It was a fair beginning, despite the mea- 
greness of the artistic life of that time, 
an idea of which may be gathered from 
the fact that there was only one dealer 
in New York City who supplied materials 
to the few studios in the neighbourhood 
of Greenwich Street and lower Broadway. 
This individual seems to have been some- ^ 
what of an autocrat, and reports relate 
that it was not uncommon for him to 
dictate to the artists who had to patronise 
him the colours he would permit them to 
use, refusing to sell certain materials if 


THE OLD SCHOOL, 


139 


he considered them inappropriate. The 
neighbourhood of his shop was a sort of 
rendezvous, just as his little parlour in 
the rear was a gathering-place for a few 
choice spirits among the still small band 
of workers. 

Notable among them was Henry In- 
man (1801-46), a well-trained painter, 
equally successful in portraits, miniatures, 
landscapes, and genre subjects. His 
“Mumbling the Peg” (at the Philadel- 
phia Academy), two boys sitting in a 
meadow, playing jack-knife, is a picture 
of decided merit. Expressed with frank- 
ness and sincerity by a man of thought 
and poetic feeling, the little oval-shaped 
picture deserves to be considered the first 
picture of note of the American school 
of genre painting. Success crowned his 
short career to a large degree, most nota- 
bly in portraiture. During a visit to 
England, in 1844, he painted the portraits 


140 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

of Wordsworth, Dr. John Chalmers, Lord 
Chancellor Cottenham, Macaulay, and 
other noted men. He was very popular 
among the profession, and with each 
returning summer a band of artists, in- 
cluding Kensett, F. E. Church, Mount, 
and McConkey, all men representative 
of this period, gathered in the Catskills to 
answer to his and Cole’s summons, and 
explored the country in expeditions on 
foot, in buckboards, or other mountain 
conveyances, so that scarcely a nook in 
gorge or valley remained unvisited. At 
the time of his death Inman was engaged 
in a series of historical pictures for the 
Capitol at Washington. 

Chester Harding (1792-1866), who had 
been farmer, chair-maker, peddler, and 
tavern-keeper before he took up portrait- 
ure as a profession at the age of twenty- 
eight, occupied in Boston about the same 
position as Inman in New York. He 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


I4I 

was a conscientious workman, like most 
of the portrait painters of this period. 

The lesson which Copley and Stuart 
had taught with their portraits and the 
picturesque dresses of their time, record- 
ing on canvas what suggests the cus- 
toms as well as the people of the Revo- 
lutionary period, 'was not as yet forgotten. 
Sully was still painting, and a shining 
example to all, and their efforts were ap- 
preciated in England as much as at 
home. Harding was a man of more than 
ordinary ability, and he was patronised by 
the oldest and most aristocratic families 
here as well 'as abroad. Contemporaries 
report that there was something magnetic 
and grand in his character, frank and 
good-natured in his daily life, and earnest 
and indomitable in all matters relating to 
his art. 

Robert W. Weir (1803-89), of Hugue- 
not descent, was the leading representa- 


142 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

tive of our historical painters, who 
acquired their training in Italy, and 
attempted to paint classical pictures of 
heroic sizes like Carlo Brumidi, whose 
then much-admired compositions are now 
entirely forgotten. 

Weir’s “Sailing of the Pilgrims” (well 
known by numerous productions) and 
“Taking the Veil” cause us to wonder 
that Americans could have so early pro- 
duced works of art as clever and con- 
scientious as his. They show dignity 
and scrupulous care, but are, on the 
whole, more pleasing than vigorous and 
' original. 

The most prominent effort in historical 
painting, however, we owe to an artist of 
German extraction : Emmanuel Leutze 
(1816-68), whose “Washington at Prince- 
ton,” “ Emigration to the West ” (one of 
the panels of the staircase at the Capitol), 
and “Washington Crossing the Dela- 



Weir. — Sailing of the Pilgrims. 






THE OLD SCHOOL. 


145 


ware ” (at the Metropolitan Museum) are 
still known to everybody. He came 
early to America, but always remained 
in touch with his native country, and 
painted many of the American subjects, 
among them the “ Washington Crossing 
the Delaware,” at Dusseldorf. The ice 
was painted from a mass of broken ice 
floating down the Rhine. He was very 
prolific, a man capable of enthusiasm, and 
aspiring to high ideals, but his art bore 
the unmistakable stamp of his teachers, 
Lessing and Shadow, and any connois- 
seur knows what that means, in particular 
when applied to figures over life-size. His 
colour was always crude and hard, and 
his drawing academical. His “ Godiva,” 
“ Iconoclast,” “Landing of the Norsemen,” 
and similar compositions, in which he 
could display his knowledge of costume, 
are even less artistic than his more realis- 
tic Washington pictures. He had vast 


146 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

intellectual resources, but was in no 
sense a painter. 

New York had gradually become the 
centre of a number of excellent portrait 
painters, such as Elliott, Page, Baker, 
Hicks, one of the first Couture pupils, 
Le Clear, Huntington, Naegle, and Gray, 
— the contemporaries of Staigg, Healy, 
and Ames in Boston, — an astonishingly 
large number, considering how few good 
portraitists we possess nowadays ; but 
photography at that time was still in 
its infancy and portraits in demand, 
even by the less wealthy class. And the 
men were grown to the task, their brush- 
work was not as clever as that in vogue 
to-day, but they all had the gift of catch- 
ing a likeness, which is, after all, the most 
important thing in portraiture. 

At a time when appreciation of purely 
technical qualities was still very scarce, 
Charles Loring Elliott (1812-68) achieved 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


147 


an extraordinary degree of excellence. 
His wondrous faculty of grasping char- 
acter, and his brush work, which looked 
vigorous in comparison with the minute, 
painstaking style of, his brother artists, 
make him incontestably the leading repre- 
sentative of the old portrait school of 
1840. His pictures are full of fine col- 
our and unity of effect, his style is direct, 
sincere, and strong, and one is amply 
compensated for the slight faultiness of 
drawing, the result of insufficient aca- 
demic training, by the comprehensive 
grasp of his subject. 

As a forerunner of George Fuller one 
may regard William Page (1811-85). He 
produced quaint types of American femi- 
nine beauty, and, as far as characterisa- 
tion is concerned, revealed rare delicacy 
and a deep insight into human nature. 
His success with colour, though often 
very marked and satisfactory, suffered 


148 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

sometimes, I suppose, by reason of the 
very multiplicity of his experiments. At 
all events, there are pictures from his 
brush in which, in the common studio 
phrase of our period, the colour does not 
“ ring true.” Also Hicks, of Boston, was 
notable for his colour. A still more pro- 
nounced sense for colour than either Page 
or Hicks was possessed by one of their 
contemporaries, a queer sort of genius, 
who died about 1870 in abject poverty, 
at the age of sixty. His name was John 
Quidor. Four of his paintings, illustrating 
Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy 
Hollow” and his “Knickerbocker’s His- 
tory of New York,” can be seen at the 
Brooklyn Institute. In the catalogue 
he is mentioned as a master of “low 
tone,” but in my opinion that is merely 
a matter of varnish and time. His pic- 
tures were painted very thinly and with 
pure colours, and their charm and merit. 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


149 


at the time they were painted, lay un- 
doubtedly in the subtle skill, with which 
the colours were blended into a harmoni- 
ous whole. He has a dainty touch and 
a naive humour that are delicious, and his 
fine mellow colour will save him from 
oblivion, despite the varnish that has 
been put on more recently. 

G. Baker was the sentimental depicter 
of ideal heads and children, and H. P. 
Gray exerted himself in figure composi- 
tions of the Italian Renaissance. Good 
miniatures, by far better than the majority 
produced to-day, were painted by Staigg 
and Miss Goodrich. 

The most successful artist of this pe- 
riod was Daniel Huntington (1816- ), 

the third president of the National Acad- 
emy. He was very popular, and dis- 
pensed with a lavish hand that which 
he earned to those in need and distress. 
He is still painting to-day, but being a 


150 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

pupil of Morse and Inman, he needs 
must be associated with the men of that 
period as a pleasing portrait painter, who 
knows best himself that he was no genius 
like Elliott, but who did as much as 
anybody to advance art at that early 
stage. In his youth he devoted himself 
to historical, allegorical, and religious 
paintings, and his “ Mercy’s Dream ” and 
“ The Sybil ” created almost as much 
sensation as Cole’s “ The Voyage of 
Life.” His portrait of Bryant, at the 
Brooklyn Institute, is a remarkable de- 
' lineation of character, despite the other- 
wise conventional treatment. 

The first American who made a spe- 
cialty of genre was William Sidney Mount 
(1807-68), the son of a farmer of Long 
Island. He exhibited his first picture in 
1828. Mount had a keen eye for the 
humourous traits of our rustic life, and 
although he was very deficient in tech- 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


I5I 

nique, he always succeeded in portraying 
some of his shrewd observations of hu- 
man nature on his canvases. “ The Long 
Story ” and “ Bargaining for a Horse ” are 
two of his best pictures. A long cher- 
ished wish to work out-of-doors, and to 
make his studies in the ' Long Island 
villages at leisure, suggested the build- 
ing of a wheeled studio with a glass front, 
drawn by a pair of horses, which enabled 
him to move from place to place and 
select any point of view he wished. F. 
W. Edmonds, a friend of Mount’s and a 
bank cashier by profession, found time to 
produce many clever “story-telling” pic- 
tures, showing a keener eye for colour, but 
less skill in the drawing and composition. 

Richard Carton Woodville, a “ Dlissel- 
dorf man,” promised very much, but 
unhappily died very young. 

J. B. Irving executed some clever inte- 
riors, with figures in old-time costume 


152 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

delicately drawn and painted, reminding 
one of Toulmouche. At this time also 
our frontier life was coming more prom- 
inently into notice, becoming a subject 
for the pen of our leading writers. Irv- 
ing, Cooper, Whittier, Kennedy, Street, 
and Longfellow celebrated Indian life 
and border warfare in prose and verse, 
while the majestic lines of Bryant’s 
“ Prairies ” seemed a prophetic prelude 
to the march of mankind toward the 
West. It is greatly to be regretted that 
the work of these courageous, enterpris- 
ing pioneers of Western genre : G. Catlin, 
C. F. Wiman, Deas, and W. H. Ranney, 
was of so little artistic value, and that 
Victor Nehlig, a Frenchman who also 
devoted himself to these subjects some 
ten years later, and whose brush had a 
very sympathetic touch, was less thor- 
oughly imbued with the actualities of 
Indian warfare and border life. 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 1 53 

Mount was destined to become the 
precursor of a whole school of genre art- 
ists, and portraiture was gradually replaced 
in public favour by the painted anecdote. 
While shiploads of the academic artificial 
productions of the Dusseldorf school were 
imported, they depicted domestic scenes 
and homely episodes of every-day life, like 
children playing with a cat, the bride be- 
fore the mirror, boys attempting their 
first smoke, etc. Meyer von Bremen, 
like Chartran to-day, by far more popular 
in America than at home,^was considered 
the typical representative of German art, 
and although more serious artists had 
nicknamed his little cabinet pieces, whose 
exquisite finish was their sole merit, 
“ German chocolate boxes,” they were 
the favourites of the picture-buying 
public. And for the next twenty years 
the popularity of “ story-telling ” in paint, 
and with it the attention bestowed on the 


154 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

human figures, steadily increased, and 
reached its height in the sixties, when 
the immigration of the peasantry of 
Europe set in, affording new opportun- 
ities in types and costumes, and when 
the Secession war, with its many sad and 
comic situations, gave to this branch of 
art a new impetus. 

Among American genre pictures which 
attracted special attention and which be- 
came popular by reproduction in steel en- 
graving, “ Forging the Shaft,” by John F. 
Weir of New Haven, “Yankee Doodle,” 
^and “Jim Bludsoe,” by A. W. Willard of 
Cincinnati, “ Arguing the Question,” by 
T. W. Wood, and the “ End of the Game,” 
by F. B. Meyer, should be particularly 
mentioned. 

At the close of the war several of the 
leading representatives of the school 
reaped an unexpected golden harvest. 
For the first time in its history there 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


155 


was money in the country, and well-to-do 
people were willing to part with thou- 
sands of dollars for luxuries, for which 
they would not formerly have spent a 
hundred. The walls of the old Studio 
Building, in Tenth Street, New York, 
could tell many a story of financial 
success and ensuing prosperity. There 
were a dozen men who had an order for 
every picture that left their easel. One 
of them was J. G. Brown, the “ shoeblack 
Raphael,’' as he has been termed. We 
all know his work. An academy exhibi- 
tion seems to be impossible without him. 
His pictures are surely not in harmony 
with modern ideas of art, but we should 
recognise the fact that, however tiresome 
and crude we may find them, he had a 
knowledge superior to that of most of his 
contemporaries, that he knew something 
of physiognomy, of which most modern 
painters are absolutely ignorant, and that 


156 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

he was one of the first who sketched out- 
of-doors and painted his pictures entirely 
from the costumed model. That he dis- 
regarded Ruskin’s dictum in regard to 
the artistic value of dirt, is largely due 
to his training and the taste of his time. 
The masquerading automatons of the 
peasant-painter Robert had not yet been 
replaced by the realistic figures of Bastien 
Lepage. 

Another successful painter of this 
period was E. L. Henry, whose works 
will outlive many of greater merits, 
not because of any artistic merits they 
possess, — they have none, — but because 
of their interest to future generations as 
replica of the customs and costumes of 
our ante-railroad times. 

Men like Brown and Henry in a way 
represent American art better than any 
one else ; net its aspirations, but its stern 
cruel facts, those the large multitude can 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


157 


appreciate and understand. Even the 
best of the picture-loving public still 
prefer story-telling to any other style in 
painting. A picture of Eastman John- 
son speaks to them. They can under- 
stand it. The profession, on the other 
hand, excepting those who practise it, 
make this branch of art a subject of 
much adverse criticism and argument. 
As long as the public wants such pic- 
tures and the artists paint for the public 
(which they invariably do, expecting 
money in exchange for their work), they 
have their place, particularly if executed 
with the ease and elegance of an East- 
man Johnson. He is the one great artist 
this school produced, our typical story- 
teller. Each one of his earlier pictures 
is like a page from a popular novel. 

Eastman Johnson (1824- ), like most 

of his contemporaries, only enjoyed the pe- 
dantic training of the Dusseldorf school, 


158 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

where he studied from 1848-51. Yet 
what a mind of large reserve power greets 
us at the outset of his career. What 
strong and earnest convictions, express- 
ing his thoughts in methods entirely 
individual, can be traced in all his works. 
In his earlier career he painted genre 
subjects, like his “ Old Kentucky Home ” 
(1867), at the Lennox Library, and his 
“ Old Stage Coach” (1871), with delicious 
frankness ; later on he devoted himself to 
semi-literary subjects, like “ Milton Dictat- 
ing to His Daughter” (1875), and to com- 
positions in which he subordinated the 
subject to execution, and in the last 
twenty years almost entirely to portrai- 
ture. 

He was progressive, and entered into 
the heart of his time. By the force of 
his imagination and antiquarian knowl- 
edge he conjures up before us the very 
spirit of the Cromwellian age. But the 



Johnson. — Old Stage Coach. 





THE OLD SCHOOL. 


l6l 


subject which suited him best he found in 
contemporary life. His “ Husking Corn ” 
(1876) is a masterpiece. He did not find 
it necessary to idealise nature, — mud or 
magnificence, it was alCthe same to him. 
The only embellishment he furnished he 
gave unconsciously, his energetic individ- 
uality. Eastman Johnson was in the 
very vanguard of those painters who 
fought for realism in modern art, and 
there are few who have succeeded as well 
as he in rendering our American life 
more picturesque. 

We feel before his works, through all 
the imperfections of his art, through all 
the faltering methods with which his 
genius sought to express itself, that a vast 
mind here sought feebly to utter great 
thoughts. We see that unmistakable 
sign of all minds of a high order, that the 
man was greater than his works. It is 
not dexterity, technique, knowledge, that 


1 62 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

impresses us in studying the work of 
Eastman Johnson, so much as character, 
and this quality, if no other one, ensures 
him the position of one of our most dis- 
tinguished painters. 

Other men of talent of this'period were 
Ward, Magrath, Wordsworth Thompson, 
and White. E. M. Ward has shown, in 
his interiors of workshops and old-fash- 
ioned houses, a more poetic feeling, more 
careful chiaroscuro, and more correct and 
forcible drawing than most of his col- 
leagues, but he did not participate in the 
reign of prosperity of 1866-70. William 
Magrath (1835- ) excelled in single fig- 

ures associated with rural life, generally 
a milkmaid or farmer, which were actual 
distinct character types. “ On the Old 
Sod,” at the Philadelphia Academy, is 
one of his best pictures. Wordsworth 
Thompson, after devoting himself to coast 
scenes, for which he made studies during 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 1 63 

a stay at the Mediterranean, became a 
depicter of the Revolutionary times and 
the Secession war. He was a skilful 
draughtsman, in particular of horses, and 
his highly finished pictures had some- 
thing ^cool and crisp about them. He 
painted gay cavalcades, travellers on 
horseback, and camping scenes, but his 
favourite subject was the figure of a 
horseman, — a scout or huntsman halting 
before a wayside inn. Among his more 
elaborate compositions is one represent- 
ing the Continental Army defiling before 
General Washington and his staff at 
Philadelphia. 

Prominent on the Academy walls were 
also the pictures of S. J. Guy, who made 
many friends by the simple pathos and 
humour with which he treated child life, 
of Fred Johnson, and Oliver J. Lay, who 
has executed some thoughtful and refined 
indoor scenes. 


164 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

J. C. Thom was an erratic sort of char- 
acter, shunned by the profession all his 
life, but who painted delicious bits of out- 
of-door figure pieces. 

The emancipation of the slaves disclosed 
to the profession of what importance our 
coloured citizens might prove in art, — 
their squalor, picturesqueness, broad and 
kindly humour, and the pathos which has 
invested their life with unusual interest. 
T. W. Wood absolutely failed therein. 
Edwin White (1817-77) used them for 
his simple studies from nature. His old 
negro dreaming of liberty before a fire- 
place (at the Lenox Library) reveals fine 
perception and a certain charm of execu- 
tion. It was left to Winslow Homer, 
however, to represent the negro, with a 
simple broad execution, as he really is. 
Alfred Kappes, who died in 1894, the 
last, most modern exponent of the old 
genre school, made a specialty of negro 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


165 

life, and combined cleverness of handling 
with genial humour, and the popular 
quality of telling a story effectively. 

Most of these artists mentioned, if they 
had any training at all, were Dusseldorf 
men ; they were people’s painters, trying 
to paint pleasing pictures, and with few 
exceptions had but little skill in handling 
the brush. The men who studied in 
Paris fared much better. There Couture 
had founded a new school. His “ Romans 
of the Decadence ” had taken the world 
by storm, and his bold and personal style, 
a perpetual challenge and defiance to 
the classic school, was the magnet which 
attracted all young art students to his 
studio. Among his American pupils, 
Edward Harrison May (1824-87) scored 
great triumphs with his “ King Lear and 
Cordelia ” and “ Franklin Playing Chess 
with Lady Howe.” Here was colour, light 
and a vigorous grasp of form, which had 


l66 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the certainty of a well-schooled hand. 
But the most talented American artist 
was W. M. Hunt (1824-79), born at Brat- 
tleboro, Vt. The son of a well-to-do law- 
yer, he enjoyed greater advantages of 
training than most painters of the early 
time. He began his studies at the Royal 
Academy, London, and later on went to 
Dusseldorf. With the same earnest idea 
to further his technique, still entertaining 
the idea of becoming a sculptor, he first 
entered Pradier’s studio, but finally aban- 
doning the idea, he joined the Couture 
class. A few years later we find him in 
Barbizon studying with Millet. In 1855 
he returned to America and established 
himself in Boston. 

Although a man of imagination and 
lofty ideal he was first of all a painter, 
the first great technician we had, and his 
influence was far felt. He had a large 
number of lady pupils, of whom several. 



Hunt. — The Flight of Night. 



THE OLD SCHOOL. 


169 


notably Elizabeth H. Bartol and Mrs. S. 
W. Whitman, gained some distinction. 
He used to take great interest in their 
progress, and to them were directed the 
“ Talks,” which were so successfully jotted 
down by Helen M. Knowlton that Hunt 
had them copyrighted, and which give a 
fair idea of his method of teaching and 
criticism. The constant progress of his 
pictures, the elaborate study he bestowed 
upon them, and their simple, broad execu- 
tion were, after all, the best demonstration 
of the art of painting he could give. 

It is very difficult to summarise his 
characteristics as a painter. The Hunt 
Memorial Exhibition of 1879 showed an 
astonishing diversity of technique, — the 
more so if one considers that many of his 
best pictures and sketches were lost in 
the fire of 1872, — covering the wide range 
from Couture s direct surface methods to 
Millet’s soulful and mystic touch. Yet 


170 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

in all his pictures the artist’s wonderful 
power of concentration and vitality in 
recording impressions are markedly evi- 
dent. His pictures are entirely free from 
the trivial and useless, showing no un- 
certainties, and lacking nothing of that 
spontaneity which is the great charm of 
masterpieces. He was always painting to 
satisfy himself, not to gain position, or the 
applause of critics and society, but to be 
true to the highest and best aspirations, 
regardless of praise and comment. 

Among the pictures that I have seen, 
and which impressed me most favourably, 
I may mention his “ Charles River with 
Bathers;” “ Horse's and Cart on a Beach;” 
the “ Hurdy-gurdy Boy,” the bright laugh- 
ing face of a Savoyard looking up to an 
imaginary window ; “The Prodigal Son,” 
who, returning in a state of semi-nudity, 
throws himself into his father’s arms, 
while his jealous brother turns away ; the 



Hunt. — Charles River with Bathers. 



THE OLD SCHOOL. 


173 


portrait of Allan Wardner (owned by 
Mrs. W. M. Evarts, New York), and his 
“ Gloucester Harbour,” very rich in col- 
our and light, an old pier and an expanse 
of water in the foreground, and a sky full 
of sun and air over the distant town with 
its shipping. There is indeed much to 
appreciate in the poetical conception of 
these pictures, the charm and originality 
of their composition, and the firm grasp 
of form and character they convey; but 
it is, after all, his spirited technique which 
fascinates most. It was Hunt who first 
shook off the trammels of the early time 
and ushered in the progressive element of 
modern art. 

Among the artists of Boston belonging 
to the set who often met Hunt at Mar- 
liave’s French restaurant were Robinson, 
Waterman, and Harvey Young. 

Marcus Waterman, one of the veteran 
artists of Boston, is to be ranked among 


174 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the Orientalists. Although he has not 
gained such a wide reputation as Weeks 
and Bridgman, yet he holds his own, and 
as a painter of sunlight he has few equals. 
The courts of the Alhambra, for in- 
stance, — a stunning scheme of peacocks 
against bluish green tiles, — and scenes 
from the “ Arabian Nights are his famil- 
iar subjects. His drawing of elephants and 
wild animals is very spirited ; the colossal 
grayish white figure of the genius (in 
the “ Merchant and the Genius ”), loom- 
ing up erect in the desert against the 
dark blue sky, shading his face with one 
hand, shows what he can do in imagina- 
tive figure drawing. Waterman’s “ Roc’s 
Egg” has been considered by many a 
superior production to Vedder’s interpre- 
tation of the same subject. 

At this occasion the names also of 
William Sartain and Prosper L. Senat, 
two other artists who devote themselves 



Waterman. — Maurouf among the Merchants. 



THE OLD SCHOOL. 


177 


principally to the depiction of Oriental 
scenery and life, may be mentioned. 

Harvey A. Young, a representative of 
our later portraiture, has a good eye for 
colour, and seizes a likeness in a manner 
that is artistically satisfactory, while he 
does not so often grasp the character of 
the sitter as his external traits. 

Two other portraitists of this period 
were George A. Story, characterised by 
vigour of style and pleasing colour, and 
Henry Furness, of Philadelphia, who died 
in 1867, just as he reached his prime. 
His first efforts showed but little talent, 
but he had the quality of growth, and 
his latest works were remarkable for the 
rendering of character. When he had 
a sitter he would give days to a prelimi- 
nary and exhaustive study of the mental 
and moral traits of the individual. 

Shortly after Hunt returned to Amer- 
ica, and instilled life and energy into 


178 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Boston art circles, another genius, John 
La Farge (1835- ), came to the front. 

He was a self-taught man, and had no 
technique at his command, but he had 
one quality which American art until then 
had rarely known, namely, colour. 

This rare gift became first noticeable in 
his flower pieces, which occupied him 
during the years 1860-65. His water- 
lilies are a revelation of colour. The 
water seems to take a green reflection 
from the flower-sepals, broken lights from 
the white blow vibrate all through it, and 
the sensitive gold of the stamens at the 
heart of the lily shines through the white 
petals quivering in the sun. 

Soon after he began his decorative work 
for both private and public buildings, by 
which he gained an international reputa- 
tion, and which was only now and then 
interrupted by the occasional painting of 
a landscape. In 1867 the architect H. H. 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


179 


Richardson saw some panels La Farge 
had made for a gentleman’s dining-room, 
and promised the artist the first deco- 
rative work at his disposal. The oppor- 
tunity came in 1876, when the building 
committee of the Trinity Church, Boston, 
engaged La Farge to undertake the whole 
mural decoration of the new edifice, the 
most ambitious attempt at church deco- 
ration ever undertaken in this country. 
The time allowed was very short, but he 
proceeded to carry it out, selecting as 
chief assistant Francis L. Lathrop. 

The character of the designs and orna- 
mentation is, on the whole, well in keep- 
ing with the Romanesque style of the 
church, and the groups of small nude 
figures in the spandrels at the top of 
the tower interior have been excellently 
painted. The large figures lower down 
are of inferior quality. They too plainly 
show the haste with which the work was 


l8o A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

executed. The two prophets on the north 
wall, however, just over the chancel, stand 
robed in an agreeable delicacy of tint, and 
in them the want of good drawing is less 
pronounced. A few years later La Farge 
painted with more deliberation two simple 
compositions depicting “ Christ and the 
Woman of Samaria” and “Christ and 
Nicodemus,” the latter one of his master- 
pieces. 

Other important work quickly followed. 
Two frescoes and the decoration of the 
St. Thomas Church, New York, the 
King’s Memorial at Newport, the stair- 
case panels and ceiling at the Vanderbilt 
mansion, and the “ Adoration of the 
Magi,” at the Church of Incarnation, 
New York, gave wide scope for splendour 
and brilliancy of colour. The best that 
this artist has yet accomplished in the 
way of work upon a church interior is his 
painting of the “ Ascension ” at the little 



From a Copley Print. — Copyright, l.siHI, by Curtis & Co. 

La Faroe. — Christ and Nicodemus. 



THE OLD SCHOOL. 183 

church on the corner of Tenth Street and 
Fifth Avenue, New York. There is an 
absence of religious feeling noticeable in 
all his pictures. There is a large degree 
of technical incompleteness in nearly all 
his work. At some points his hands seem 
to refuse to do their work and begin to 
grope. He has no scruples whatever in 
applying figures of new and old masters, 
and leaving it to his assistants to enlarge 
his designs. He knew well enough that 
his colour would atone for all his sins and 
shortcomings. His colours, although they 
have something of The barbaric sumptu- 
ousness of the Orient, glow in the proper 
environment with a dim luminous beauty, 
with a spirit and life of their own. They 
stamp everything he touches with the 
seal of genius. 

Of late he has devoted much of his 
time to water-colours, for which he has 
undertaken journeys to Japan, Ceylon, 


184 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Samoa, the Fiji Islands, and other remote 
corners of the globe. Their drawing is 
often very feeble, but their rhythmic notes 
of colour invariably redeem their other 
shortcomings. They are as strong as in 
the days when he painted his “ Newport, 
Paradise ” (Academy exhibition about 
1870), a vast landscape in morning light, 
scintillant with sunbeams, in which sepa- 
rate colours are almost indiscernible. 
Pink, green, violet, dark and pale blue 
tints, and other subtle melodies of colour 
flit and flame across the canvas like a gor- 
geous pageantry, like a palpitating blaze 
of jewels, and yet unite to a perfect har- 
mony. 

La Farge was also the first to manu- 
facture stained glass to suit his own 
purposes. He originated the style of 
painting merely the face, hands, and 
flesh-tones of the figure and of construct- 
ing the drapery and accessories of opales- 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 1 85 

cent glass, the fibrous texture of which 
replaces the drawing. Such a piece of 
glass, with all its surface corrugations and 
stratifications, is a work of art in itself. 
Before the work on Trinity was begun, he 
had made his first experiments, but not 
before i88i, when he constructed the 
Harvard Memorial Window, did he suc- 
ceed, to his own complete satisfaction, in 
producing pieces of glass of a certain 

I 

colour which were inlaid or sprinkled with 
one another. In his windows at the 
Church of Ascension, we see effects alto- 
gether novel in this art. The depth and 
purity of colour have almost the quality of 
painting and, although utterly unlike the 
ancient examples in arrangement and 
spirit, they surpass mediaeval work ' in 
regard to richness and splendour. His 
“ Christ and Nicodemus ” is his master- 
piece in this department, as is his “ As- 
cension ” in religious mural painting. 


1 86 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Followers La Farge had many, but no 
successor to him has arisen among them. 
Francis Lathrop, who studied with Madox 
Brown, reproduced the spirit of the Pre- 
Raphaelite painters with a great deal of 
sympathy, but without special accentua- 
tion. Crownin shield introduced barbaric 
sumptuousness into interior decoration, 
and Louis C. Tiffany, once a painter of 
European street scenes, carried into the 
sphere of professional decoration all the 
inventive taste, and freedom from con- 
ventionality which he displayed in the 
execution of his first important work, the 
windows and wall paintings of the Union 
League Club. Other notable workers in 
this field are Lamb, Armstrong, and 
Heinigke, and H. J. Thouron in Philadel- 
phia. The construction of stained glass 
windows, although La Farge’s work has 
never been surpassed, has steadily pro- 
gressed, but church decoration seems to 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


187 


rest solely in the hands of La Large. 
Nothing has been done that compares 
with his work. 

At present Violet Oakley (1874- ) is 

engaged on a big triptych for the Church 
of Angels, New York, the centre in mosaic, 
which promises to be well drawn, and 
interesting in its line, space, and colour 
composition, with a delightful parallelism 
and repetition of figures. The religious 
feeling, vLich is generally missing in 
such works, is quite pronounced in Violet 
Oakley’s art. It is superior, at any rate, to 
M. L. Macomber’s religious sentimental- 
ism and E. Daingerfield’s attitude of devo- 
tion, but whether it is strong enough to 
lend her work a striking individuality — 
to do what colour did for La Farge — is 
another question. 

Colour was also the principal charm 
of two other men. W. A. Babcock, who 
spent nearly all his life at Barbizon, was a 


1 88 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

sympathetic and poetic painter of nudes 
and costumed figures. His colour is soft 
and luminous. R. L. Newman (1827- ), 

of whose works John Gellatly’s private 
gallery contains thirty examples, is a col- 
ourist in the sense of the old masters. He 
excels in richness and satiety of separate 
tones, and is clever in bringing them into 
proper relationship. His Madonnas, Red 
Riding-Hoods, reading girls, classical fig- 
ures with animals, “ Christ Walking on the 
Sea,” etc., are colour dreams pure and 
simple. As subjects they have but little 
interest. His colour, as well as Bab- 
cock’s, is purely sensuous in its effect, it 
does not arouse the finer qualities of emo- 
tional imagination. Their art is not vi- 
brant enough, it never loses itself beyond 
the material, where one forgets oil paints 
altogether, where they melt into the lyri- 
cisms of soul as in Ryder, for instance. 
Newman’s and Babcock’s perceptibilities 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 1 89 

come to a standstill in the act of trans- 
forming vague inspirations into colour, 
and only here and there they soar a 
little beyond it. He held a representa- 
tive exhibition of his work at Goupil 
gallery in 1894. 

We now come to that phase of art 
which was the realisation of what all the 
men since 1828 had struggled for, the 
beginning of a native art, and which 
is best represented by Winslow Homer 
(1836- ) and Thomas Eakins (1844- )• 

Both are still working to-day, and their 
work has rather increased than lost in 
interest. I mention them in this chapter, 
because they asserted themselves long 
before the appearance of the so-called 
new^ school of 1878, and because the ten- 
dency to depict reality, which they persist- 
ently clung to during all their career, has 
been superseded by other aims and ideals 
of art. 


190 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

It is extremely seldom that we find an 
American artist who is also American 
by nature. The majority of our artists 
have, through their European schooling, 
acquired a foreign way of looking at things 
that can be readily traced to Paris, Lon- 
don, or Munich. A few, and among them 
the best, pose, like Whistler, as cosmo- 
politans. They profess to believe that art 
is universal, that nationality has nothing 
or but little to do with its development; 
and yet they contradict this attitude in 
admiring Japanese art, which in recent 
decades has taken the place occupied at 
the beginning of this century by Grecian 
and Roman art. 

For Japanese art is above all else a con- 
densed and clarified expression of racial 
and national traits. Gradually, through 
the centuries, Japanese art has developed 
out of the mythological and religious 
beliefs, out of the peculiar customs and 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


I9I 


manners of that artistic people and the 
environment and climate in which it 
lives. If our artists believe in Japanese 
art, they should endeavour to understand 
its spirit, and not overlook the causes of 
its most rigid laws. True enough, our 
American nation, through the influences 
of incessant immigration, has not yet 
attained its final equilibrium. Our con- 
ditions of life are still too confused for 
sharply defined expressions, such as we 
find in Paris, for instance, where every- 
thing has been classified by long famil- 
iarity. Nearly all the masterpieces of 
American painting — I mean those 
painted in America by Americans — show 
refinement rather than strength, which is 
peculiar, as strength is undoubtedly more 
characteristic of a young country like the 
United States than the suave, sensuous 
style of a Dewing or Tryon. 

American men and women of advanced 


1 92 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

taste, such as can afford to patronise 
art, turn rather to epicureanism than to 
simplicity and strength. After accumu- 
lating their wealth, the rich have every- 
thing at their command, except the 
super-refinement of taste and manners 
which the European nobility have ac- 
quired through centuries of indolence. 
The Anglomania and love of titles of our 
plutocracy is only a natural outcome of 
existing conditions. 

Therefore, the lack of rough, manly 
force, and the prevailing tendency to ex- 
cel in delicacy and subtlety of expression. 
The Michael Angelo strain is lacking 
almost entirely in our art. Walt Whit- 
man’s “ Others may praise what they like, 
but I, from the banks of the running Mis- 
souri, praise nothing in art or else, till it 
has well inhaled the atmosphere of this 
river, also the Western prairie scent, and 
exudes it all again,” was a voice in the 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


193 


wilderness. The artists have taken no 
heed of it. Only men like Winslow 
Homer or Thomas Eakins have endorsed 
it to a certain extent with their work, the 
only two men who are masters in the art 
of painting, and at the same time have 
strong, frank, and decided ways of ex- 
pressing something American. 

Winslow Homer began his career as 
a lithographer in Buffalo. During a stay 
in Boston he designed for the wood-en- 
gravers. In 1859 he moved to New York, 
and after a visit to England he retired to 
Scarboro, Maine, where he lives, as far 
as polite society is concerned, in absolute 
isolation, coming in contact only with 
nature and the seafaring folks that live 
around him. 

Aggressive in disposition, he engaged 
in a bitter warfare against all convention- 
ality, scorning alike all accepted schools, 
claiming that nature, studied from the 


194 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

standpoint of observation and discern- 
ment rather than that of intellectuality 
or sentiment, should be the only founda- 
tion of art. From this standpoint his 
great naturalism sprang into life. Take 
for instance his “ Lookout,” exhibited at 
the Society, spring 1897. is a master- 
piece. • Words cannot increase or depre- 
ciate its value ; it speaks for itself. A 
glimpse of the swaying upper deck of a 
vessel; the sea, white in the starlight over 
the rail; and just under the ship’s bell a 
lifted hand and a rugged face — stern and 
weather-beaten like the brazen bell — 
with parted lips, shouting “ All’s well.” 

A crude and angular art, but classic in 
its dignity and strength. The figure, a 
little awkward perhaps, is a living, moving, 
breathing being, an expression of absolute 
reality. 

The emotion which such a picture 
arouses is enough to make one abjure 


I 


I 

i 



Homer. — Inside the Bar. 



THE OLD SCHOOL. 


197 


academic art for ever. It seems as if 
there is nothing really lasting, nothing 
that will endure, but the sincere expres- 
sion of the actual conditions of life. 

His technique has steadily improved, 
— his colour, formerly rather neutral 
and cold, has of late grown more vivid 
and impressive; but his work in the six- 
ties and early seventies, including “ Inside 
the Bar” and “Listening to the Voice 
from the Cliffs,” already showed all his 
directness of expression, and his love for 
truth and strength, so apparent in his 
“Visit from the Old Mistress” (1879) 
and “Life Line” (1884). 

Profoundly moved by a certain kind of 
roughness and wildness in nature and in 
man, he became the painter of the long- 
shoremen ; of the adventurous existence of 
our life-saving crew ; of the pioneers of civ- 
ilisation, prospecting the Western wilds ; of 
farmhands in shirt-sleeves and coarse hide 


198 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

boots, on the fields and hillsides of New 
England ; of negroes and their humble 
shanties and the queer habits of Southern 
plantation life; of soldiers around camp- 
fires ; and of country children, real Yankee 
boys and girls, playing by the quaint little 
schoolhouse, under boughs of apple-trees 
in bloom, through which the sun is sifting, 
or romping over the fields dotted with 
rural homes. He has also painted types 
of other countries, always with an Ameri- 
can accent, however, — for instance, his 
famous Gloucester studies, the fisher- 
women of Tynemouth, — but the bulk of 
his work is American. And it is this 
national quality which makes Winslow 
Homer great. Nobody could mistake 
the nationality of the rustic humanity he 
represents. Nobody could doubt that 
Winslow Homer is an American by birth 
and nature. 

Whenever Winslow Homer’s name is 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


199 


mentioned, there rises in my mind a pic- 
ture, a picture of rare and uncouth 
beauty: a sandy shore, lined by a wall 
of chalky rocks, a wide wind-worn sweep 
of a grayish black sea, heaving slowly with 
the rise and fall of billows under a cloudy 
sky. The dark silhouette of a sail is seen 
against a streak of white light at the hori- 
zon. And in this scene of desolation a 
sturdy young woman strides vigorously 
against the gale, her garments twisted in 
quaint flowing lines around her. 

Winslow Homer paints prose, but a 
prose of epic breadth. The breath of out- 
of-doors is in his pictures. We excuse the 
false notes in his flesh tints, his awkward 
linear beauty, his neglect of values, his 
crude key of colours, for there is poetry in 
the pulsation of his air, in his turbulent 
waves, in his flshing-boats riding out a 
gale, as well as in the statuesque beauty 
of his men and women, whose plastic 


200 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

immobility has something of the angular 
outlines of the old New Englanders. In 
all his work there is something that 
reminds one of the ancient sea winds, 
which sung around the cliffs ages ago, 
something as monumental as the rugged 
cliffs themselves, which have defied the 
sun and storms of centuries. 

To-day his vision is as fresh and uncon- 
ventional and his power and individuality 
as indisputable as ever. His “ In the 
Gulf Stream,” exhibited at Knoedler’s in 
1901, is one of the greatest pictures ever 
painted in America. 

His brother artist, Thomas Eakins, 
of Philadelphia, is quite a different char- 
acter. Nearly every one who looks at 
his “ Operation,” the portrait of Doctor 
Gross, a Philadelphia medical celebrity, 
lecturing to a class of students in a 
college amphitheatre, exclaims, “ How 
brutal ! ” And yet it has only the bru- 



Eakins — Operation. 




THE OLD SCHOOL. 


203 


tality the subject demands. Our Ameri- 
can art is so effeminate at present 
that it would do no harm to have it 
inoculated with just some of that bru- 
tality. Among our mentally barren, from 
photograph working, and yet so blase, 
sweet-caramel artists, it is as refreshing as 
a whiff of the sea, to meet with such a 
rugged, powerful personality. Eakins, like 
Whitman, sees beauty in everything. He 
does not always succeed in expressing it, 
but all his pictures impress one by their 
dignity and unbridled masculine power. 
How crude his art is at times we see in 
the startling effect of blood on the sur- 
geon’s right hand, in the portrait of 
Dr. W. D. Marks. 

As a manipulator of the brush, however, 
he ranks with the best; he does not stip- 
ple, cross-hatch, or glaze, but slaps his 
colours on the canvas with a sure hand, 
and realises solidity and depths. His 


204 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

work may here and there be too severe 
to be called beautiful, but it is manly 
throughout — it has muscles — and is 
nearer to great art than almost any- 
thing we can see in America. 

His “ Christ on the Cross,” a lean, 
lone figure set against a glaring sky, — 
austere, uncouth, and diabolically realistic 
as it is, — is a masterpiece of artistic anat- 
omy, in the knowledge of which nobody 
approaches him in this country. 

Thomas Eakins’s art and personality 
remind one of the dissecting room (where 
he has spent so many hours of his life), of 
the pallor of corpses, the gleam of knives 
spotted with red, the calm, cool, deadly 
atmosphere of these modern anatomy les- 
sons with the light concentrated upon 
the dissecting table, while the rest of 
the room is drowned in dismal shadows. 
And yet, with all his sturdy, robust 
appearance, he is as naive and awkward 



Fuller. — A Turkey Pasture. 




THE OLD SCHOOL. 


207 


as a big child that has grown up too 
fast, and his eyes have the far-away 
look of the dreamer. Indeed a quaint, 
powerful personality! 

Of the younger men H. M. Hartshorne 
shows a good deal of brutal vigour. 

During these years that brought Hunt, 
La Farge, Homer, and Eakins to the 
front, there lived in Deerfield, Mass., in 
utter seclusion, a painter — already about 
fifty years old — who was destined to be- 
come the greatest genius which the art of 
our country has produced. 

In 1878 there hung a picture on the 
walls of the New York Academy called 
“A Turkey Pasture” (owned by W. H. 
Abercrombie, Brookline, Mass.), simple in 
theme, sober in tone, telling no story, 
which at once won the painter fame and 
patronage and secured him a position by 
the side of the most daring painters of the 
new school. This picture bore the signa- 


2o8 a history of AMERICAN ART. 

ture of George Fuller (1822-84). After 
seventeen years of seclusion the fifty-six 
years old painter had returned, not a be- 
ginner but a veteran, and yet a debuta^it 
once more. His first triumph was 
rapidly followed by others. His “ Quad- 
roon,” “ Winifred Dysart ” (owned by J. 
M. Sears, Boston), “ Psyche,” “ Nydia,” 
“ The Romany Girl ” (owned by Mrs. J. 
T. Williams, New York), “Priscilla” 
(owned by F. L. Ames, Boston), and 
“ The Berry Pickers ” placed him among 
the first painters of the world. 

George Fuller came of Puritan stock 
and was born at Deerfield, Mass. An 
instinct of art which ran in the family 
asserted itself already during his child- 
hood. At the age of twenty he estab- 
lished himself in a studio at Albany, paint- 
ing portraits and enjoying the tuition of 
the sculptor, Henry Kirke Brown. Hence 
he shifted to Boston and a few years later 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


209 


to New York, where he worked in the life 
classes of the Academy. On the strength 
of a portrait of his friend and teacher 
Brown, he was - elected associate of the 
National Academy. After spending a 
winter in the South, he went to Europe, 
not to study, but to learn from nature, 
and from mediaeval art treasures. He 
visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, Flor- 
ence, Rome, and Sicily, and returned in 
i860 to America, but not to portraiture. 
Dissatisfied with his previous efforts, and 
filled with strange visions, he seems to 
have felt that if he were ever to work 
his way, it would be on the strength 
of his own efforts. He shut himself up 
in his Deerfield home, took to farming, 
and the world of exhibitions, of dealers 
and buyers, of artists and critics, knew 
him no more, and there, close to nature, 
he mastered the heights and depths and 
mysteries of his craft. 


210 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Fuller’s pictures are so simple that one 
is not impressed by a surprising technique 
or some startling effect ; he is a poet who 
interprets quiet scenes of the simple life 
of the fields, or more often some study of 
character, evolved from within his own 
nature. All his work has a subdued yet 
glowing colour, a somewhat wilful chiaros- 
curo, a groping, hesitating touch (often 
caused by drawing in the half-dry paint 
with the handle of his brush), and a misty 
vagueness of effect in common. His pic- 
tures were never pictures of definite locali- 
ties and personalities, but idealised visions 
of shadowy outlines and soft rich colour, 
rising from vague backgrounds. It is sel- 
dom that he chose a subject of literary 
interest, like his “ Priscilla,” and even 
there it is a matter of conjecture whether 
the shy, startled girl, with one hand 
raised in a gentle, half-bewildered ges- 
ture, is really Longfellow’s heroine. 


THE OLD SCHOOL. 


21 I 


In his “ Winifred Dysart ” we see the 
figure of a frail young girl dressed in a 
pale lilac gown, — holding a small empty 
jug in one hand, — against a landscape 
background of delicate gray with a very 
high horizon line, which affords merely a 
glimpse of a cloud-streaked sunset sky. 

In the “ Quadroon ” (owned by Mrs. S. 
D. Warren, Boston), a rather more force- 
ful chord is struck. Sitting in the corn- 
fields with her arms resting on her knees, 
her large sad eyes turned to us, she ex- 
presses the mystery and suffering of her 
race. 

“ And She Was a Witch ” (at the 
Metropolitan Museum) represents a wood 
interior ; in the distance, through tall 
tree-trunks a woman is led away to the 
dread tribunal, while in the foreground a 
young girl seeks refuge at the door of her 
humble dwelling. I know of no other 
modern painter who could master such 


212 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

a subject, unless it were Matthew Maris. 
Fuller always realises that true pictorial 
charm, which is neither descriptive nor 
meditative merely, but is inseparable from 
the special form in which it is conveyed 
as the musical charm of a song. His 
“Nude,” sitting listlessly on the ground, 
her rosy flesh tints shimmering faintly 
through the soft golden hue which per- 
vades the picture, clings to our memory 
like a strain of music that we have heard 
in the twilight and that has haunted us 
ever since. 

It is, however, to his “ Romany Girl ” 
that Fuller owes his greatest renown. 
What singular elusive charm, what wealth 
of expression radiates from the wild-eyed, 
passionate, yet tender face and lies hidden 
in the subtle animation of the reposeful 
figure! In her eyes is something of that 
expression of life and beauty which 
quivers on the lips of Mona Lisa, some- 





Fuller. — Romany Girl. 



THE OLD SCHOOL. 


215 


thing of that subdued and graceful mys- 
tery, which can be found in the best of 
Leonardo’s work. 

Fuller was doubtless one of the most 
powerful exponents of poetic or emotional 
paint the world has ever seen. To recog- 
nise how curiously complete he is, we 
must note how difficult, nay impossible, 
it is for us to follow him into his work- 
shop. He withdraws completely from the 
reach of our examination. And this has, 
certainly in his case, led to some odd mis- 
understandings of his position as man and 
as artist. Fuller has been said to be 
more of a poet than a painter. He has 
even been pitied like Millet for not being 
able to paint at all, and blamed for not 
drawing directly from the model. What 
an extraordinary misapprehension of both 
the man and his art. If we take him 
as a colourist alone, Fuller has given us 
enough to make a name for half a dozen 


2I6 a history of AMERICAN ART. 

painters. He has presented us with great 
problems in colour, tone, and light, and 
his sense of the largeness of things, and 
his rich and luminous touch, reminds us 
of the school of Giorgione. Because, be- 
sides all this, his work was dominated by 
another element, the powerful melancholy 
sentiment of his poetic temperament, be- 
cause in fact he has solved with his paint 
the more difficult rather than the easier 
problem, should he not be classed first of 
all as a painter — as our foremost painter 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 

OWARD the middle of the sev- 
enties a great change came over 
our American art. The large 
exodus of students to Parisian and Mu- 
nich schools, to foreign studios and gal- 
leries, had begun a few years before, and 
its results were just returning to us in the 
shape of a throng of vigorous, eager, cos- 
mopolitan young painters, all alike disre- 
gardful of older American traditions and 
filled with new ideas on every subject. 
The realm of technical possibilities had 
been explored. Gerome and Lefebvre, 
Carolus Duran and Bouguereau, and the 
Julien, Coralossi and Academie des Beaux 
Arts schools in Paris, and the Piloty and 

217 



2i8 a history of AMERICAN ART. 

Dietz schools in Munich, had given 
ample proof of the superiority of Euro- 
pean teaching. Fine draughtsmanship, 
bold and fluent execution of the brush, 
and careful observation had become com- 
mon property of all art students. The 
innovations of the plein air school had 
found ready appreciation, and the realism 
of Bastien-Lepage occupied the minds of 
the younger men. 

The years 1876-78 were red-letter days 
in the annals of American art history. 
One event of importance was crowding 
upon the other. 

The Centennial Exhibition had just 
taken place. Religious mural painting 
had a renaissance under the leadership 
of La Farge. St. Gaudens had found in 
1877 the first opportunity to reveal his 
talents in the “Adoration of the Cross,” 
a group of angels at the ^St. Thomas 
Church. In 1878 W. M. Hunt’s mural 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


219 


paintings were put up in the Senate 
Chamber of the Albany State-house. A 
new interest in etching was aroused, and 
wood-engraving suddenly soared to its 
pinnacle of perfection. 

The most important of these events, 
however, was the foundation of the Soci- 
ety of American Artists in 1878. Already, 
in the spring exhibition of ^1874, a num- 
ber of pictures attracted attention, which, 
beside the carefully finished and dull- 
toned canvases of the old academicians, 
looked like vista through wide open win- 
dows. They were the subject of a most 
violent controversy, in which the theories 
of the old and new schools clashed, and 
resulted finally in their separation. The 
two Munich men, Walter Shirlaw and 
W. M. Chase (1849- ), were the leaders 

of the movement. Of the older men, 
Inness, Fuller, Hunt, Chas. H. Miller, 
and Thomas Moran sympathised with 


220 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 


the movement. The first exhibition of 
the Society, held at the Kurtz Gallery, 
March- April, 1878, contained works by 
Bridgman, De Forrest Brush, Chase, 
Colman, Currier, Dannat, Dewing, Duve- 
neck, Eakins, Wyatt Eaton, Fuller, Hunt, 
Inness, La Farge, Homer Martin, M. R. 
Oakey, C. S. Pearce, Th. Robinson, Ryder, 
Sargent, Shirlaw, Thayer, Tiffany, Tryon, 
Twachtman, D. Volk, Olin Warner, Weir, 
Whistler, and Wyant, — a marvellous list 
of names, embracing nearly all those who, 
by their lofty standard, have helped to 
raise the standard of modern American 
art. 

It was not this marvellous productive- 
ness alone which brought about this 
reform. An art school, in which the 
pupils themselves took care of the man- 
agement and elected their own teachers, 
was opened. The Academy instruction 
was free, the League self-supporting. 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


221 


This was the severe test of its merits. 
The young art students, however, flocked 
to the new institution, which not only 
showed them the use of tools, but gave 
them a facility of expression, and soon 
gained a considerable surplus in its treas- 
ury. The rich experience of Shirlaw, and 
the enthusiasm of Chase, coupled with the 
severe but rational methods of European 
academies, hitherto unknown in this 
country, exercised a decided influence 
on the technical development of our art. 
Among the teachers were Shirlaw, Chase, 
Fitz, Wyatt Eaton, Cox, Beckwith, Met- 
calf, Twachtman, Weir, etc. 

Among these men, who strove first of 
all for technical perfection, B. R. Fitz 
(1855-91) and Wyatt Eaton (1849-90) 
were undoubtedly the most talented. 
Both died rather young, before reaching 
full maturity. Wyatt Eaton painted with 
a superb breadth, and his broadening of 


222 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

details has rarely been surpassed. His 
“ Ariadne,” “ Daphne,” “ La Cigale,” and 
“ Girl with Viol ” are productions remark- 
able for their vigour and solidity. His 
mechanic reproduction in pen and ink 
was well-nigh marvellous. He died com- 
paratively unknown, but the world has 
crowned his work with posthumous lau- 
rels. Fitz had less strength, and was of 
a more dreamy disposition. His work is 
low in tone, reserved in colour, and beau- 
tiful in line. His “ Reflection,” painted 
in 1884, is the best nude of that period. 
His portraits, delicate and refined, were 
painted with commensurate skill, and his 
landscapes were noticeable for their warm 
and mellow tones. He was cut down in 
the flush of promise, and few were more 
lamented than this master of form. 

The art of several of the other men, 
who won their spurs a decade or so ago, 
retrograded before they had created a 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


223 


style of their own. Kenyon Cox, Carroll 
Beckwith, W. H. Low, and Walter Shir- 
law have to suffer the fate that their later 
work did not come up to the standard 
the public and profession had expected 
after seeing their youthful efforts. They 
no longer have the power of attract- 
ing people who, once disillusioned, have 
turned away to others. The younger 
men do not believe any more in them. 
And yet what promising work did they 
not perform at the start, only to mention 
Cox’s “ Evening,” Beckwith’s portraits of 
Mr. Isaacson and Mr. Walton, Low’s 
“The Day of the Dead,” and Shirlaw’s 
“ Sheep-shearing in the Bavarian Moun- 
tains,” “ Goose Girl,” “ Man with a Dog,” 
and his foundry studies, “ Rolling Steel 
Plates ” and “ Emptying the Crucible.” 
Also Frank Duveneck, now a resident 
of Cincinnati, passed early into oblivion 
despite the marvellous fecundity and 


2 24 ^ HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

power he displayed during the first few 
years after his return from Europe. I 
have watched these rapid evolutions from 
good to bad more than once ; they are just 
as frequent among the present generation. 
Two startling examples are Frank Eugene 
and E. A. Bell. On examining their Eu- 
ropean work, one is willing to concede 
a unique place to them ; but in their 
later achievements all strength seems 
to have departed from their brushes. 
Perhaps these men will rouse them- 
selves to new efforts ; if not, the only 
explanation I can find for the deteriora- 
tion of their work is that they were not 
made of the stuff which produces great 
artists. 

Most of our own young art students 
think it a great achievement to exhibit a 
picture or a statue in the Salon, not com- 
prehending how easy it really is to pro- 
duce one good work of art, as long as 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


225 


they are under the instruction of some 
modern master, in continual contact with 
ambitious colleagues, and exalted by the 
glory of French art treasures that have 
suddenly burst upon them. Such hot- 
house inspirations have but little perma- 
nent value. It often would be far better 
if these young talents had never seen a 
French studio. 

The majority of those who return prove 
equally unsuccessful in advancing our na- 
tive art. Obliged to stand on their own 
feet, no longer sustained by competition, 
technical advice, and by the suggestions 
derived from artistic surroundings, abso- 
lutely alone, without even sympathy, 
generally forced to earn their living as 
artisans or in some branch of art unsuit- 
able for them, they only too often find 
themselves impotent to rise above unfor- 
tunate circumstances. Dissatisfied with 
themselves, they long for the artistic 


2 26 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

atmosphere of Europe, and only produce 
weak reflections of foreign art. 

William M. Chase is almost the only 
man of the technical innovators of 1878 
who has steadily improved. All his work, 
no matter whether portraiture, still life, or 
landscape, is still distinguished by the 
same vitality, by the same flexibility of 
execution, which enchanted us in his 
earlier work, for instance “ The Children 
of Piloty.” He widened his vision and 
strengthened his technique by manifold 
trips to London, Paris, Holland, and 
Spain, and the study of Whistler and 
Velasquez. And his latest work is still 
his best; some of his interiors reveal sub- 
tleties that are on a par with Degas. 

What a pity that Chase should aspire 
to the honours of a Julien instead of 
simply remaining our best technical 
painter! For there is no denying that 
Chase is one of the foremost landscapists 


I 



Chase. — Portrait of a Child. 



THE NEW SCHOOL. 


229 


and portrayists, and the best still-life 
painter we possess. Few can handle 
the painter’s brush as skilfully as he on 
this side of the water. With him every- 
thing is first impulse, his work is thrown 
off with brio, the enchantment of the 
brush work carries it along. Why, there 
are passages in some of his pictures which 
even brush magicians like Whistler and 
Zorn cannot surpass. Chase is always 
clever. Clever is a word often misused. 
It is well applied to him. 

There is nobody who can cover a big 
canvas with such ease, rapidity, and skill, 
and his pictures belong to the best in 
every exhibition, no matter what their 
association may be. But above all else, 
he is the painter of metal surfaces, of 
copper, brass, and pewter vessels. What 
a shiver of delight must run through his 
frame when he dashes in the high lights 
in his still-life pictures ! A woman’s face 


230 . A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

is scarcely as interesting to him as a 
copper casserole. There is nobody in 
America, and scarcely any one in Eu- 
rope, who can excel him in painting 
brass. There is a shimmer of brass 
throughout his personality, studio splen- 
dour, and work. How it sparkles ! but 
the sparkle is so genuine, because he has 
never catered to the taste of the public, 
but invariably painted for his pleasure. 
His great popularity, however, depends 
on the admiration of his pupils, upon 
whom he has asserted an influence which 
is strongly felt in American art. 

Among his most talented pupils are 
Emma Sherwood, Elizabeth Forbes, Mrs. 
Leslie Cotton, Seymour Thomas, Irving 
Wiles, Ch. C. Curran, Chas. E. Langley, 
E. P. Ullman, and Robert Reid. 

Irving Wiles is a man of poetic tem- 
perament, but of little strength. In his 
work we discover the imprint of his mas- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


231 


ter, but with a smoother and more pains- 
taking execution. 

Ch. C. Curran succeeds excellently well 
in making his pictures look limpid, ultra- 
refined; and in replacing the little dash 
and brilliancy he originally had by a sort 
of sweet sentimentality, — best compared 
to some effeminate, soft-flowing cordial, 
served in dainty porcelain cups, and 
meant, I suppose, for ladies and children. 
To be just to tractable Curran, however, 
one must never forget his fantastic Church 
rivalling efforts. His “ Dream ” (mimic 
worlds, represented by soap bubbles, with 
reclining nude females, floating in space) 
is one of the few works of pure imagina- 
tion which our practical nineteenth cent- 
ury America has produced. 

At this point it may be appropriate to 
investigate how modern technique has in- 
fluenced the various branches of art, as 
marine, cattle, flower, and still-life paint- 


232 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

ing, etc., which in the art of the ninteenth 
century are largely represented by special- 
ists. In order to be just to all, this neces- 
sitates the mention of many artists of the 
older school, and I have\made it my ob- 
ject to treat them as nearly as possible in 
a chronological order. 

Our marine art shows a number of able 
artists, although they have by no means 
been so numerous or capable as the mar- 
itime character of our people might lead 
us to expect. 

William Bradford, by origin a Quaker, 
has made himself a name for his enter- 
prise in going repeatedly to Labrador to 
study icebergs and lonely coast scenery. 
He has painted some spirited composi- 
tions. Charles Temple Dix, who unfortu- 
nately died young, executed some dashing 
imaginative and promising compositions, 
and Harry Brown, of Portland, has suc- 
cessfully rendered certain coast effects. 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


233 

The ablest painter of that period was 
James Hamilton, of Philadelphia. His 
work is very unequal, sometimes almost 
childish, but in his “ Ancient Mariner,” 
and similar serious compositions, he 
showed beyond question that he was 
an artist of genius, at times as poetical 
as Thomas Cole. His colour was some- 
times crude, but he handled pigments 
with skill, ?nd composed with the virile 
imagination of an improvisatore. His 
“ Last Days of Pompeii,” at the Memorial 
Building, Philadelphia, although no ma- 
rine, is a very able picture. 

The most popular marine painter to 
this day, at least in certain parts of the 
country, is W. T. Richards (1833- ). 

He is fond of representing a strip of 
shore at the time when the tide comes 
rushing in. His late work looks rather 
mannered, and has grown monotonous in 
its everlasting similarity of the composi- 


234 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

tion and its pale green colour; but few 
have understood the construction of a 
wave like him. He is well represented 
by “ The Beach ” in the Corcoran Gallery 
and “ The Bell Buoy” at the Philadelphia 
Academy. His pictures of the bleak, 
snow-like, cedar-tufted dunes along the 
Atlantic coast have met with less pub- 
lic favour, while his woodland scenes are 
open to the charge of being too green 
and monotonous in colour. A Dutch 
painter by the name of F. H. de Haas, 
who came here with the reputation of 
having been court painter to the queen, 
had a decided influence on our art. 

By far more talented was John E. C. 
Peters, a Dane by birth, who died in 1878. 
When he first began to paint in Boston, 
his pictures were weak in colour and rude 
in drawing. But he improved with mar- 
vellous rapidity. Every inch a sailor, a 
ship to him was no clumsy mass laid awk- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


235 


wardly on the top of the water, but a 
thing of life, with an individuality of its 
own. “ Making Sail after a Storm,” rep- 
resenting a clipper shaking out her top- 
sails in the gray gloom succeeding a 
storm, is a strong picture. So also are 
his “ After the Collision ” and “ A Ship 
Running before a Squall.” 

Also, W. E. Norton (1843- ) made 
several voyages before the mast, and was 
therefore well equipped as far as observa- 
tion goes, even at a time when his tech- 
nique was still hard and mechanical. 
His best picture of this early period is 
probably his “ Fog Horn ” representing 
two men in a dory blowing a horn to 
warn away a steamer stealthily approach- 
ing them. His later pictures, largely de- 
picting coast scenes with crowds of fisher- 
folk, painted with a sensuous, agreeable 
touch, have become quite popular. Infe- 
rior in the knowledge of seamanship, but 


236 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

more poetical in conception, was Arthur 
Quartley. He won a rapid and deserved 
reputation for coast scenes and effects of 
shimmering light on water. His skies are 
often very strong. 

A peculiar place is occupied by Gedney 
Bunce, whose large marines of the Adri- 
atic, shrouded in scumbled mist, are note- 
worthy for their rich tonality of liquid 
yellows. Some of his pictures seem to 
have been painted with ground-up jewels, 
so soft and full is the lustre of their 
colouring. 

Among the younger men, Walter 
Dean, of Boston, should be mentioned. 
His “Peace” — one of our colossal white 
men-of-war in full sunlight — attracted 
considerable attention at the World’s 
Fair. He is the painter of the New 
England fishing population at work in 
their old picturesque boats. F. F. Eng- 
lish did some delightful work before he 



Snell. — Twilight on the River, 




THE NEW SCHOOL. 


237 


retrograded into pot-boiling. F. K. M. 
Rehn and W. F. Halsall have painted 
many pleasing marines and coast views. 

But it is not the specialists who have 
done the best work in this department. 
They are easily eclipsed by Ryder, who 
expresses the solid mass and bulk of the 
ocean, torn by the storm into troughs 
and crests of weltering foam, with a 
strong appeal to the imagination. Maria 
a Becket, inspired by genuine enthusi- 
asm, has rendered some of the wildest 
and grandest scenes of the ocean, and 
there are few about whose works there 
is more of the raciness and flavour of 
water. Also Henry B. Snell is an en- 
thusiastic student of the sea. How well 
do I remember his “ Wreck of the Jason,” 
in a bluish-green surf with quaint, yellow, 
wind-flapped sails against a reddish-green 
sky ; the “ Haunt of the Sea Gulls,” where 
white birds wing around bleak rocks over 


238 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

an ultramarine sea. And does not all the 
work of the specialists pale into insignifi- 
cance beside the breadth, power, and vital- 
ity of Winslow Homer s waves, that dash 
against the solitary rocks of the North- 
ampton coast? 

Animal painting was never a strong 
point of American painters. Our school 
had no Snyder, Moreland, or Landseer. 
The cattle pictures of the Hart brothers, 
of Robinson (Boston), Peter Moran, and 
Ogden Brown are as unsympathetic as 
those of Howe and Carleton Wiggins 
nowadays. 

William Hayes showed decided ability 
in his representations of bisons, prairie- 
dogs, and other dogs. Weak in colour, 
he nevertheless succeeded in giving spirit 
and character to the groups he painted, 
and among our animal painters holds a 
position not unlike Mount's in genre. 

T. B. Thorpe, in such semi-humourous 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


239 


satires as “ A Border Inquest,” represent- 
ing wolves sitting on the carcass of a 
buffalo, at one time promised success- 
fully to work up a vein peculiarly Ameri- 
can in its humour, and which was carried 
to a higher degree of excellence by W. H. 
Beard and F. S. Church. Beard has been 
called our American .^sop, and with some 
right, as he made a specialty of expos- 
ing the failings and foibles of our sinful 
humanity by the medium of animal genre. 
Monkeys, bears, goats, owls, and rabbits are 
in turn impressed 'into the benevolent ser- 
vice of taking .us off. Church is a much 
more refined draughtsman, he excels in 
tigers and bears in all their varied mo- 
tions and habits, often suggestive of the 
action and expression of human beings. 

George Inness has painted some excel- 
lent cows, and Ryder has shown in his 
horses more draughtsmanship than he 
ordinarily seems capable of. Shurtleff 


240 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

entertained in his earlier career a pleas- 
ant fancy for catamounts and deer, and 
Marcus Waterman has portrayed the ele- 
phant with true artistic temperament. 
H. R. Poore, of Philadelphia, devotes 
himself to animal painting with a hearty 
love, a vigorous style, and fine feeling for 
colour, space, and composition. 

J. A. S. Monks, of Winthrop, Mass., 
has devoted a lifetime to the study of 
sheep, and depicts them with sympathy 
and truthfulness. He does not merely 
give us picturesque views of a group of 
sheep, but tries to solve the real character, 
the soul of these animals. 

The man to whom the first place 
among American painters should be 
unanimously conceded is Horatio Walker 
(1858- ), born in Canada. Horatio 

Walker is an artist who struggles for 
something, who nourishes an ardent de- 
sire to realise great art. He has the rare 



Walker. — Spring Morning. 



THE NEW SCHOOL. , 


243 


gift of sifting his subjects from unneces- 
sary details, of painting only the essen- 
tials, and thus combining realism and 
classicism to a decorative as well as 
suggestive art which satisfies the most 
modern taste. Pictures like “ The Har- 
rower,” “ Tree Fellers,’' “ Hauling the 
Log,” “ A Spring Morning,” can challenge 
competition with any modern European 
cattle and landscape paintings. Their 
raffine simplicity and classic calmness 
compare favourably with the best of 
Dewing’s and Tryon’s art, and the colour, 
the appreciation of light, and the ripe- 
ness and harmony and tone which char- 
acterise them show Walker to be a 
master of the first rank. Amusing and 
interesting is the conception Walker 
entertains of cattle and household ani- . 
mals. He is on very intimate terms 
with them. He knows their ways of 
life, and feels with them their joys and 


246 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

troubles of existence. He gives to the 
brutes he paints life and soul. His ani- 
mals seem to know something of Goethe’s 
“ Weltschmerz.” His oxen, with a few ex- 
ceptions, when they simply have the grand 
movements of nature, are represented as 
“beasts of toil;” his cows seem to be 
resigned to a fate of drudgery ; his sheep, 
huddled together in the pale morning 
light, some of which show traits of 
Schenck’s and Mauve’s breeds, look as 
forlorn and ascetic as the almshouse 
inmates who were lost in the forest in 
Maeterlinck’s play “ Les Aveugles.” Also 
over his landscapes, those forest clearings 
with a few yellow leaves shivering on 
barren branches, hovers an atmosphere 
of loneliness and melancholia, — relieved 
here and there in the background by 
the vague indication of spring, — that 
only a country whose soil is desolate and 
barren and snowbound one-half of the 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


247 


year can exhale. I have spent one winter 
in Canada, and some of its sad, silent win- 
ter scenes have made a deep, most vivid 
impression upon my mind. Up there 
the farmers have something of Millets 
“ sublime murkiness and original pent 
fury,” and looking at Walker’s pictures 
I involuntarily asked myself, “ How many 
human lives had to be sacrificed to con- 
quer that Canadian desolation for the 
usances of civilisation } ” A picture that 
sets one thinking is generally a good one. 

The pigs are the only ones of Walker’s 
animals that know how to take life ; they 
lie complacently in their sties, in the midst 
of their rich milieu of manure, rottening 
straw, and mire, and in colour, conception, 
and technical handling are almost without 
exception masterpieces. Four of his most 
representative pictures are owned by 
G. A. Hearn, New York. 

Flowers are one of the favourite sub- 


248 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

jects of women painters. It is natural 
that their charm should appeal more read- 
ily to the emotional female nature than to 
the more austere and scientific intellec- 
tuality of man. Two or three dozens 
of women painters who paint flowers 
tolerably well could be easily enume- 
rated. The first flower painter of supe- 
rior ability was Miss Rollins, whose work 
about 1879 recalled the rich massive 
colouring of Van Huysum. She com- 
posed with great taste and laid on her 
colours with superb effect. Other effect- 
ive fruit and flower painters of her time 
were George R. Hale and M. J. Heade, 
who was fond of depicting the sumptuous- 
ness of tropical vegetation. During the 
last two decades Way, of Baltimore, the 
late G. C. Lambdin, of Philadelphia, who 
took a deep interest in the cultivation of 
roses, and Miss Green, of Boston, who 
enjoys the reputation of painting “the 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


249 


soul of flowers,” were successful in gain- 
ing public favour. In our time Mrs. E. 
M. Scott, who renders white roses with a 
kind of unaffected wholeness of nature, 
yet with a delicate beauty and poetical 
significance of their own, and Abbott 
Graves, who paints elaborate composi- 
tions in the French Salon style, endeav- 
ouring to lend his flower masses a raison 
d'etre by introducing a wheelbarrow or 
the bow of a boat, on which they rest, are 
noteworthy exponents of this delicate art. 
Yet the pictures that linger most pleas- 
antly in my memory are Alden Weir’s 
and La Farge’s flower pieces and “ The 
Rose Garden ” by Mrs. Dewing (Mariah 
Oakey). 

Still life has rarely been made a spe- 
cialty, and rarely been handled by ar- 
tists of superior skill. Hill in the sixties 
painted the plumage of birds with a lov- 
ing spirit and astonishing accuracy. Emil 


250 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Carlsen is now about the only one I could 
mention. His arrangements of fowl, vege- 
tables, and ceramic and brass ware are 
exceedingly clever but strangely cold and 
unsympathetic in colour. One wonders 
involuntarily if that man has any fire 
in his soul to warm his mentality. 
W. M. Chase still can boast of paint- 
ing the finest examples of still life in 
this country. 

Battle painting had but very few expo- 
nents. It was in the sixties that the his- 
toric art of Weir and Leutze gave way to 
battle painting in the modern sense. The 
Secession War had given rise to some 
important work like Winslow Homer’s 
“ Prisoners to the Front,” and Hunt’s 
“Bugle Call” (1864), and Julian Scott 
had a moderate success with his “ In 
the Cornfields of Antietam.” Soon after 
Rothermel, a German artist, painted gi- 
gantic canvases like the “ Battle of Get- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 25 I 

tysburg,” which was one of the attractions 
of the Centennial Fair. 

Gilbert Gaul (1855- ), a restless, rov- 

ing spirit, who began his career with 
painting pretty women and genre scenes, 
and now illustrates his various experi- 
ences in foreign lands, owes his reputa- 
tion largely to his spirited interpretation 
of military scenes. His “ Charging the 
Battery” and “Wounded to the Rear” 
give him a leading rank among battle 
painters. He represented action at times, 
principally in his sketches, with a dash 
and energy that was even superior to 
De Neuville. 

More polished and just as truthful 
was W. Trego (1859- ), who at the be- 
ginning of the eighties painted a number 
of pictures like “ The Battery en Route,” 
“ The March to Valley Forge,” “ Battery 
Halt,” which at once secured him a prom- 
inent position in our art. He was an 


252 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

earnest student, accurate in characterisa- 
tion, life-like in representation, and pleas- 
ing in his gray colouring. Still conscious 
of technical weaknesses, he went to Paris, 
and soon after sent pictures like “ The 
Colour-Guard,” and “ Running the Gaunt- 
let,” to the Philadelphia exhibitions, which 
looked like imitations of Detaille and 
Morot. He had become a more skilful 
painter, but less of an American and less 
of an artist, for he had apparently sacri- 
ficed his own originality of idea to the 
“glorification of war” as delineated by 
French battle painters, and with which 
our nation can have but little sympathy. 
America has lost him, as it had lost so 
many others before. 

The painting of street scenes is, strange 
to say, one of the oldest branches of our 
art. The appreciation of common sense 
and the love for reality, which were always 
characteristics of the American, may have 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


253 


something to do with it. At any rate, 
pictures bearing the title “ Central Square, 
Philadelphia,” and “ Election at the State 
House,” were already painted by J. L. 
Krimmel, a German artist, who came to 
this country in 1810 and was accidentally 
drowned near Germantown, Pa., in 1821. 
Even the town of Brooklyn had its 
painter at that early period. Francis 
Guy devoted himself with great financial 
success to street scenes. His “ Brooklyn 
Snow Scene” (1817) is regarded as his 
chief work. After these efforts, however, 
little seems to have been done before 
Eliza Greatorex made her etchings and 
pen-and-ink drawings, and Louis C. Tif- 
fany, who in Europe had clung pretty 
closely to cathedrals, tried to discover 
picturesque bits about New York City. 
One of his most successful jDictures repre- 
sented an up-town green-grocer’s shanty 
and garden. Also the picturesqueness of 


2 54 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the New York Harbour attracted him, as 
it did Samuel Colman. 

Blum and Lungren soon followed, and 
did much creditable work particularly in 
illustration. More recently the etcher, 
Mielatz, undertook a labour of love in 
his “ Picturesque Bits of New York,” and 
Pennell made some explorations in old 
Philadelphia. Chase painted his Central 
Park scenes, that made him more popular 
with the public than anything else he has 
done. But it was left to Childe Hassam 
to become our street scene painter par 
excellence, the depicter of the ever-chang- 
ing effects of restless city life. He has a 
wonderful eye for atmospheric effects, for 
the tumult in thoroughfares and city 
parks, and for the endless colour sug- 
gestions that are revealed by a crowd of 
pedestrians, vehicles, or by any combina- 
tion of the manifold paraphernalia of a 
metropolis. 




s 

I 

IT 

1 



Trego. — The Colour- guard. 



THE NEW SCHOOL. 


257 


The simplest scene suggests a picture 
full of interest and sentiment to him, and 
he is usually successful in reporting these 
suggestions. His strength lies in paint- 
ing a man, for instance, with a few dots of 
colour, and yet expressing perfectly the 
man’s movement, whether he be running 
or walking slowly. 

With his atmospheric effects he some- 
times plays like a wizard, the expression 
of his own personality often being entirely 
lost in it. 

A most serious rival Childe Hassam 
has in Ch. Austin Needham, the painter of 
the “ Mott Haven Canal.” I almost pre- 
fer Needham’s street scenes. They are 
so honest, serious, and simple, and imbued 
with our atmosphere, while the principal 
merit of Hassam’s work is that “ the light 
of France is still upon them.” 

Another street scene painter is R. 
Henri, whose aim is rather to seize the 


258 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

mystery, the passion, the despair, as well 
as the gaiety of a modern metropolis, 
than to describe its mere topographical 
features. 

Among the young men W. H. Law- 
rence should be mentioned, who is a 
careful observer of life en masse, and 
apparently possesses enough technical 
faculties to give us realistic and con- 
scientious work in that direction. 

Everett Shinn, the latest addition in 
this field, — which calls for more poetic 
and imaginative treatment by far both in 
literature and art than it has hitherto 
received, — will for various reasons be 
mentioned at length in another chapter. 

If one desires to know Japan as it 
looks to Western eyes, one will find that 
C. D. Weldon has done the most realis- 
tic, Blum the most poetical, and Parsons 
the most picturesque work. La Farge, 
too strong an individuality to be a faith- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


259 


ful reproducer of scenery, has manipulated 
the Japanese landscape to suit his own 
tastes, and given us a few delicious remi- 
niscences of the Land of the Rising Sun. 

“ The red Indians are undoubtedly pic- 
torial and perhaps semi-picturesque,” was 
Walter Shirlaw’s verdict about the artis- 
tic possibilities of the American Indians. 
This was after a Western trip which he 
and Gilberr Gaul, the battle painter, had 
made in the interest of the Interior De- 
partment. The verdict, overexacting as 
it may seem, comes nearer to the truth 
than one may imagine at the first glance. 
These Western tribes, with their character- 
istic make-up, their wild way of living, and 
their peculiar ceremonious rites, contain 
for the artist all the elements of the picto- 
rial, but even to the layman they can 
hardly claim to be as picturesque as, for 
instance, the Arabian horseman whom 
Schreyer paints. 


26o a history of AMERICAN ART. 

The majority of our American artists 
seem to share Walter Shirlaw’s opinion — 
if they have given the subject any thought 
at all — as the number of those who have 
made the Indians their special genre is 
very limited. There are W. Cary, H. F. 
Farny of Cincinnati, E. W. Deming, Ru- 
dolf Cronau, Gaspard Latoix and De Cost 
Smith, a most thorough student of Indian 
customs and manners. He has lived for 
a long time among the Sioux, the Crows, 
the Bannocks, the Chippeways, Omahas, 
Winnebagoes, and studied their folk-lore 
and the various dialects of their languages. 
Among those who have tackled the sub- 
ject occasionally are Dodge and Hosier. 
E. W. D. Hamilton, of Boston, is the only 
one who has tried to introduce the subject 
into pictures of ambitious size and into 
fresco painting. 

He once set himself the ambitious task 
of depicting on a huge canvas the rela- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


261 


tion of the red Indians to modern civili- 
sation. The picture told its own story. 
A number of Indian warriors on horse- 
back, accompanied by a squaw carrying a 
child on her back, and an old chief borne 
on a litter, represent the doomed race, 
wandering through a barren, mountain- 
ous region, in search of a new hunting- 
ground. They are stopped by the appari- 
tion of an old Indian and a boy; the 
latter makes a gesture as if forbidding 
them to advance farther, while the old 
man points to an Indian burial-place that 
is pitched up in the cool shade of a rock, 
the only dark spot in the picture. The 
background is a powerful impressionistic 
landscape — one of the mountain ridges 
near Gay Head — in the strongest sunlight, 
most dazzling in the direction in which the 
Indians are forbidden to proceed. 

The most poetical and the most suc- 
cessful renderings artistically of the red 


262 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Indians were furnished by George de For- 
rest Brush (1855- ), born at Shelbyville, 
Tenn. 

In the beginning of his career Brush 
gave us poetical renderings of the Ameri- 
can Indian. His Indian hunter (owned 
by C. D. Miller, Jersey City), with his 
spoils on his back, squatting at the edge 
of a lake and reaching forth to pluck a 
water lily, and the Indian canoeist resting 
on his paddle for a moment to gaze after 
the flight of a wild swan over the lone- 
some lake, belong to the best figure paint- 
ings and story-telling pictures of American 
art, and constitute undoubtedly the most 
artistic representations the red Indian 
has hitherto found. Other noteworthy 
pictures of his are “ The King and the 
Sculptor ” and “ Killing the Moose.” 

A few years ago, feeling probably that 
the red Indians were too remote from the • 
every-day interest of our people, and possi- 



Brush. — The Indian and the Lily, 




THE NEW SCHOOL. 


265 


bly also from the higher aims of art, he 
took up subjects comprehensible to every- 
one, namely, maternity and childhood, and, 
with an exquisite quaintness of line and 
colour, began, like Abbott Thayer, to 
idealise his wife and children for a serial 
of modern Madonnas. 

The first time I met De Forrest Brush 
was in a Forty-ninth Street flat several 
years ago. He was painting at one of 
the Mother and Child pictures, which was 
sold in Boston at — for an American pic- 
ture — quite a fabulous sum. The humble 
parlour which served as studio, a glimpse 
through a half-open door into the inti-' 
macies of his private life, two little chil- 
dren approaching shyly in the corridor, 
and the unfinished portrait of his wife on 
an easel, told me at once that these rep- 
resentations of motherhood were cre- 
ated directly out of an individual home 
atmosphere. 


266 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

They lack, however, the freedom and 
originality, the bold and personal style of 
Thayer’s work. They are constructed too 
closely after the pattern of mediaeval reli- 
gious work to give absolute pure en- 
joyment. His pictures look somewhat 
laboured, not as far as their technique 
is concerned, but in that which they 
try to express, the feeling of “domestic 
piety.” 

Brush represents the Tolstoian element 
in our art. He wants his art to be didac- 
tic, popular, of elevating influence upon 
the masses. The painter is ever ready 
to expound his theories with a sort of 
boyish vivacity. Many men, who made 
their name in history and art, had such a 

boyish countenance and youthfulness of 

% 

spirit. 

One day I argued in his studio : “ But 
I do not see how you do justice to your- 
self by selling your pictures to some rich 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 267 

man, who shuts them up, so that few have 
the opportunity of seeing them ! ” 

“ That’s why I am tired of picture paint- 
ing and want to give it up ! ” he ejaculated. 
“ This may be my last picture (pointing 
to an easel). I would not go around the 
corner for all the honour of the Salon. I 
shall never be satisfied until I am admired 
by the people of Cherry Hill.” 

“ I do not see how they will under- 
stand your work except you lower your 
standard.” 

“ The worse for me ! You know I lived 
among the Indians ; they were not inter- 
ested in how I painted them, yet they 
were highly interested in decorating their 
own shields with simple ornaments. It is 
the same way with the people of Cherry 
Hill. They want something which they 
can appreciate and afford to buy.” 

“ Do you think you can reach them by 
some reproductive art ? ” I inquired. 


268 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

“ I thought of taking up lithography.” 

“Yes, any amount of good could be 
done, not by the silly stereotype pictures 
that Prang publishes, but by real artistic 
work distributed in the same extensive 
manner. Everywhere you can run across 
a Prang lithograph.” 

“ Prang did for money what I may do 
out of enthusiasm and love,” said Brush, 
heroically. 

“ Then you would become a sort of 
ideal Prang ? ” 

We smiled at the idea, and yet were 
both convinced that an ideal Prang could 
become one of the leading factors in the 
art education of our American people. 

However, he is still painting Madonnas, 
surrounded with a larger number of chil- 
dren every year, and each garbed in a 
different shade of colour. 

Brush standing now at the head of 
“ modern scholarly art ” in America, al- 



Brush. — Mother and Child. 



THE NEW SCHOOL. 


271 

ways remained a true Gerome pupil. 
His drawing is strong and distingue, and 
his figures are interpreted with truth of 
expression. In his Indian pictures his 
colour was at times very beautiful and 
powerful. Of late he has striven more 
for strong and effective contrasts, his 
colour has grown richer, but his pictures 
no longer possess the harmony and sim- 
plicity of his former method. He has not 
yet solved the mysterious affinity between 
certain colours and certain emotions. 

An artist to whom America owes a debt 
of gratitude it can never pay is Abbott 
H. Thayer (1849- )» born at Boston. 

One might concede, at the very start, 
that his drawing is at times very faulty, 
his colour uncertain, and his flesh tones 
impure, although they generally harmo- 
nise with the drapery. Yet the general 
effect, the final result, is always dignified. 
Despite his technical shortcomings, he 


272 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

possesses style^ which is given to but few 
men. 

His “ Corps Aile,” the white-winged 
body of a girl against a blue background, 
has already that naivete and at the same 
time that intensity of expression which 
recalls the early Florentine art. Every- 
thing is so fresh, so unaffected, so pecul- 
iarly his own, that we can well afford to lose 
a little technical brilliancy as long as his 
pictures rather gain than lose by his slow 
and frugal methods. His healthy manly 
vigour and his naive religious feeling, a 
sort of modern pantheism and childlike 
faith in humanity, impresses us deeply in 
these days when men are so self-conscious. 
He feels things with primitive simplicity, 
joy, and frankness, and this feeling is not 
affected but natural with him. The idyllic 
classic note was in the man, and would 
have found its way into his work, no 
matter if he had been a painter, poet, 



Thayer. — The Virgin 








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THE NEW SCHOOL. 


275 


sculptor, or musician. His three master- 
pieces are “ The Virgin ” (at the House of 
Freer), “The Virgin Enthroned” (owned 
by J. M. Sears, Boston), and the “ Caritas ” 
(at the Boston Art Museum). The first 
picture represents a young woman in 
flowing drapery, stepping briskly forward, 
leading a little boy and a still smaller girl 
by the hand. The clouds are shaped like 
wings, and in the atmosphere is the sug- 
gestion of spring. “ The brooding spirit 
of life itself is there, bringing to one’s 
thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers 
and insects.” The second picture shows 
the same girl with a maturer look, Ma- 
donna-like enthroned, with the two chil- 
dren kneeling in adoration at her side. 
The last picture shows the same model 
(his daughter) standing in the centre with 
uplifted hands, and one child on each side 
leaning against her. It is more decora- 
tive than the other two without losing 


276 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

the spiritual motive, with which all his 
sensuous forms are saturated. 

Abbott Thayer’s work occupied indeed a 
strange position in the world’s art. It is a 
modern combination of the inwardness of 
the Middle Ages and the vagueness of the 
Orient. His pictures take the place of 
the old religious symbols, in which he 
himself very likely no longer believes, 
and yet they are imbued with so devout 
a spirit that they could be used as shrines 
for worship in modern homesteads, re- 
minding us of all that is good and noble 
in the human race. 

H. O. Walker has lately strayed into 
the same direction, after enjoying the 
reputation of being one of the few suc- 
cessful painters of the nude figures in 
Boston. He copied his models with every 
physical shortcoming; only the truthful- 
ness of his flesh tints redeemed them 
from vulgarity. His draped figures, al- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


277 


though marked by better drawing, more 
solid construction, and a delightful note of 
tenderness and affection, lack the quality 
which would make them look distin- 
guished, which the hermit of Scarboro, 
(N. Y.) possesses in such a rare degree. 

F. H. Tompkins, one of our best figure 
painters and a pupil of Lofftz, shows all 
the characteristics of that technical school, 
which led German art to independent 
mastership. Correct judgment, simplic- 
ity of composition, sureness of lines, for- 
cible modelling, firm, unobtrusive brush 
work, natural though rather sombre and 
at times muddy colouring, and a clever 
handling of conflicting lights are also 
T ompkins’s technical accomplishments, 
but his principal endeavour is, after all, 
to express some feeling, a vibration of the 
soul individual to himself. 

His first important picture, “The Wor- 
shippers,” showed this tendency. It rep- 


2yS A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

resented a German girl in plain black, 
standing tall and erect in a serious and 
devout attitude in a church pew, beside 
an old woman attired in a veil and check- 
ered shawl. 

Lofftz, who is rather chary of praise, 
remarked about this picture : “ Gabriel 
Max could not paint such a hand, but he 
could paint a better picture.” 

More powerful by far he appears in 
expressing the sentiment of motherly 
love. There are more than half a 
dozen canvases treating this subject, two 
of which are particularly characteristic. 
The first, at the Art Club, Boston, depicts 
a rustic mother betraying in her whole 
figure and the joyful expression of her face 
that all her thoughts are with her child. 
The second type of motherhood is repre- 
sented by a delicate and refined looking 
lady, with reminiscences of old New Eng- 
land in her dress, sitting listlessly at the 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


279 

cradle from which her thoughts have 
wandered far away. 

Two other pictures of more than ordi- 
nary significance are his “Good Friday” 
and “ Afterglow.” The latter represents 
a twilight scene. A road, lined on the 
right with cottages, loses itself in slight 
undulations in the distance, where a mass 
of houses, with numerous lights, suggests 
the never-ceasing tumult of city life. The 
sun has set in vehement red and orange 
colours, under a greenish sky, with dark 
bluish-gray clouds. In the foreground a 
priest with choir-boys, carrying lighted 
lanterns and crucifix, is returning from a 
funeral. The patch of scant vegetation, 
with a pool of water to the left, the barren 
road, the dark cottages with an occasional 
flickering light in the dim windows or 
streaming through a half-opened door, 
appear like the vague desire of sad, strug- 
gling humanity for something brighter 


28o a history of AMERICAN ART. 

beyond the grave. And the same feeling 
is unconsciously worked out in the colour- 
ing, the monotony of the bluish-gray tone 
of the picture finding relief in the fierce 
colours of the sunset. It is a picture of 
endless suggestions that appeal to the 
poetic mind, before which we can dream 
and experience a desire to fold our hands, 
however unbelieving we may be. 

F. W. Freer (1849- ), a resident of 

Chicago, is another excellent figure 
painter, a man of an energetic nature 
and a fresh spirited style. He has de- 
voted himself chiefly to simple and sin- 
cere transcriptions of the fair sex, whose 
grace and beauty he depicts in modern 
dress, selecting a happy medium between 
portraiture and genre for his expression. 

Other notable painters of the human 
figure are Wilton Lockwood, J. H. Ca- 
liga, Benjamin Eggleston, Louis Loeb, and 
Sargent Kendall. The latter’s “ The End 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


281 


of the Day,” a mother and child subject, is 
a very strong picture. If he succeeded in 
making a few more as meritorious as this 
one, he would deserve to be classed among 
our foremost painters. 

The greatest genre painter of the new 
school was Th. F. Hovenden (1840-95), 
born in Ireland. His “John Brown Being 
Led to Execution,” at the Metropolitan 
Museum, is one of the most popular pic- 
tures America has hitherto produced. 
Prince Kropotkin pronounced it the 
only picture of lasting value he had 
seen in that gallery. His judgment, how- 
ever, was biassed by his theory that art 
should exercise a distinct moral and edu- 
cational influence. It certainly should, 
but not merely by the choice of sub- 
ject, but rather unconsciously, by force 
of its beauty. ' Hovenden’s picture has 
undoubtedly the quality of attracting and 
interesting the large multitude. The pa- 


282 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

thetic figure of John Brown, followed by 
the executors of the law and surrounded 
by soldiers, who hold back the coloured 
people pressing forward to show the mar- 
tyr a last sign of gratitude, is told with a 
touching familiarity and simple and accu- 
rate drawing. He is deficient in painter 
qualities, but one finds in his pictures 
knowledge of form, power of character- 
isation, and correct relation of the figures 
to the background. The following are a 
few examples that have found enthusiastic 
appreciation: “Elaine,” “In the Hands 
of the Enemy ” (almost as popular as the 
John Brown), “ Brittany Image Seller,” 
“ Chloe and Sam,” and “Jerusalem the 
Golden,” a lamplight interior painted in 
the colours of the impressionist school, 
with a young woman and a man seated in 
a listless attitude, listening to a girl play- 
ing the piano in the background. 

Louis Moeller has gained a reputation 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 283 

for his genre scenes, in which he portrays 
unique types of old men with a decided 
ability for characterisation, and dashy but 
rather obtrusive brush work. 

The only representative of the school, 
the art of which is summed up in a panel 
of the size of a hand, is J. M. Gaugengigl, 
of Boston, the Meissonnier of America. 
It is quite a number of years ago that 
he painted the fresco of little fauns over 
the stage of the Boston Museum for one 
hundred dollars. His pictures, like “ The 
First Hearing” and “The Duel,” sell for 
thousands of dollars now. Nobody can 
compare with him in painting details ; as 
a painter of buttons, shoe buckles, every 
thread stealing out of a buttonhole, every 
wrinkle in a satin breeches, he reigns su- 
preme. A remark which one of the artists 
made before Gaugengigl’s picture deserves 
to be repeated: “Take a man, dress him 
up in a revolutionary costume, place him 


284 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

among old-fashioned furniture, and look 
at him through a diminishing glass, and 
you have Gaugengigl’s pictures.” 

Gaugengigl is equal to Meissonnier in 
skill of detail and colour, although he 
never became his peer in representing 
action, as he painted mostly interiors with 
one or two figures and rarely attempted 
more ambitious compositions. Two ex- 
ceptions are his suicide, a man lying dead 
near the seashore, or his cavalryman, sud- 
denly shot from an ambush in the hills (at 
the Boston Art Museum). 

Two painters of remarkable versatility 
are Edward Simmons and Robert Blum. 
Simmons is a good “ stock ” painter. He 
is at home in all parts. He can paint a 
young girl putting on her stocking with 
touches of French frivolity, a marine with 
all its delicate gradations of vibrant air 
and water, and a decoration with touches 
of the sublime. In two of his more im- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


285 


portant pictures, one of which I saw at 
Philadelphia and the other (“ The Car- 
penter’s Son ”) in the Grand Union Hotel, 
N. Y., he would have climbed the very 
heights of pictorial art, if a tin coffee-pot 
(that could have aroused the envy of 
Chase) in one, and the wood shavings in 
the other, had not been painted in such 
a “devilish clever” manner as to attract 
the principal attention. 

Robert Blum, whose art reminds 
Vance Thompson of “a portmanteau 
that has seen many countries and has 
been labelled accordingly,” always aspired 
to the exquisite exotic touch of Fortuny, 
but, sad to state, has more often applied 
the amiable method of Rico. His work 
is always brilliant, animated, and refined, 
his Venetian and Japanese pictures fairly 
sparkle with crisp and delicate effects. 

Portraits are painted as numerously as 
ever, but the large majority are commer 


286 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

cial, and have no claim to art. Our 
wealthy classes still prefer to have them- 
selves painted by foreign portrait painters, 
and, as long as they engage men of rare 
ability, like Carolus Duran and Zorn, with 
whom our artists can hardly compete, 
little fault can be found, but when it 
comes to mediocre talents like Chartran 
and Madrazo, it is rather deplorable. 
Some of our native artists, like Eakins, 
Chase, Henri, and Dewing, for instance, 
should be able to satisfy the most exact- 
ing demands in that direction. 

Among the portraitists who are special- 
ists three stand out distinctly, Vinton, 
Brandegee, and Cecilia Beaux. 

F. P. Vinton, of Boston, is our best por- 
trait painter. He was a great admirer of 
Hunt, and his works show some of the 
breadth and virility of his great prede- 
cessor. Vinton’s portraits are generally 
good likenesses painted in a masculine 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


287 


style, with solidity, depth of colour and 
excellent draughtsmanship, but with a 
rather prosaic conception. Yet, however 
far they may be removed from spon- 
taneity and brilliancy of execution, he 
seldom gives us a picture that could be 
called insignificant. It seems of late as if 
Vinton were struggling to get away from 
his darker colouring, and reach some 
higher expression of truth. His work at 
least shows a steady improvement. At 
all events, he is more competent than 
most American artists to portray the 
character of the average well-to-do Ameri- 
can, with his manliness, never-abating 
energy, self-satisfaction, and democratic 
spirit. His portraits of women are nearly 
always failures. 

Less successful in securing orders is 
R. L. Brandegee, now living in Farm- 
ington, Conn. The portraits he now 
and then exhibits, strong in characterisa- 


288 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

tion, impressive in their colouring, and 
executed in a decisive manner, are a most 
convincing evidence of his power. 

Cecilia Beaux is another artist who 
devotes her talent entirely to portraiture, 
which is in itself a decided merit in this 
art world of ours, in which illustrations, 
teaching, and portrait painting are gener- 
ally only considered means to keep artists 
from starvation. Miss Beaux’s individu- 
ality is developed in two characteristics : 
brilliancy and refinement. They are com- 
bined in such an exquisite, vital manner 
as to render her pictures real fragments 
of beauty, not entirely free, however, from 
superficiality, and a certain trickiness, 
which generally accompany brilliancy. 
Each portrait contains beautiful touches 
which, carried only a little bit further, 
would blossom forth into delightful man- 
nerisms, as, for instance, the blue-gray 
lines which she uses as outlines and em- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


289 


phasis in the shadows. Her drawing is 
often uncertain, and would, undoubtedly, 
improve by anatomical studies in the life 
class. Trousers generally have legs in- 
side. Yet her portraits, in whatever sur- 
rounding they may be, are always sure to 
attract attention by their agreeable colour 
schemes, simplicity of arrangement, natu- 
ralness of pose, and their general chic 
technique. But beneath the flamboyant 
surface there is a good deal of drab, a 
rigidity, inherent in her personality; she 
has not yet learned to animate her art 
with emotional and intellectual dashes 
that flash forth from the storm clouds 
of genius. 

Bonnat, for instance, is just the oppo- 
site to Miss Beaux, a good deal of drab 
on the surface, but flamboyant beneath. 
Miss Beaux lacks the penetrative glance, 
her observation rests on the external 
picturesqueness of things. 


290 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Perhaps her subjects have not favoured 
a display. of spiritual predominance. But 
it is doubtful whether she could ever 
paint the head of an Edison satisfactorily; 
she might, however, paint Paderewsky. 

Women push themselves to the fore- 
ground everywhere, but the result is 
rather dissatisfactory and tiresome. Only 
Mariah Oakey (in former years), Mary 
Cassett, Cecilia Beaux, Maria a Becket, 
and lately Violet Oakley, have shown 
superior talents. 

Why do women always paint such 
trifling subjects? Why do they always 
imitate men, instead of trying to solve 
problems which have never been touched 
before? The women artists have still to 
come (Rosa Bonheur was a mere sugges- 
tion) who can throw a new radiance over 
art by the psycho-physiological elements 
of their sex, and only then the large num- 
ber of women will be justified in modern 





Copyright, 1888, by F. S. Church 


Church. — Viking’s Daughter. 





I 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


293 


art. The woman who can paint men as 
we have painted women, and paint women 
as we have painted men, will win for her- 
self the laurel wreath of fame. 

Clara McChesney is one of the few 
whose art shows some individuality, de- 
spite the fact that she has learnt so much 
from certain modern Dutch painters that 
she will never forget their methods. The 
principal merit of her work is that she 
paints everything as if seen at a distance 
of five feet, which is proper. She sur- 
prises by a monotony of tone which is 
only surpassed by her monotony of sub- 
jects. Her figures are just as dull, for- 
lorn, and beggarly-looking as those of 
Israels, Neuhuys, Artz, etc. 

Other conscientious women workers of 
more or less talent are Matilda de Cor- 
doba, Ida Waugh, L. Fitzpatrick, A. E. 
Klumpke, Clara Weaver Parrish, Amelia 
B. Sewell, Jane B. Child, Belle Havens, 


294 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

Elizabeth Nourse, Edith Mitchell Prell- 
witz, etc. 

The so-called poetic picture is fairly in 
swing, but it is delightful to note that the 
artists do not find it necessary to ransack 
the pages of writers for a subject, but rely 
upon their own imagination. 

F. S. Church (1842- ), with his elfin 
tandems, ostrich dances, peacocks in 
snow-covered parks, etc., was the pioneer 
in this direction. At times he gave vent 
to a more serious, half-philosophic, half- 
grotesque strain of mind, as in his 
“ Northern Sphynx,” a monster of ice 
symbolising the dread perils of polar ex- 
plorations, “ The Sybil,” a young girl 
looking at the head of a mummy, and 
his etching, “ Silence,” the head of a 
mummy whose lips are touched by a 
rose ; but he always returned to his serio- 
comics, — his bears eating ice-cream and 
baking griddle-cakes, or flimsily clad dam- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


295 


sels with chafing-dishes at the seashore, 
— those silly and yet so well-told fairy 
tales for grown up people. Church was 
also the first of our self-taught men, 
who unconsciously introduced some of 
the elements of Japanese art into his 
pictures. 

A Japanese gentleman, who recently 
took a look at J. Gellatly’s picture collec- 
tion, to the astonishment of his host, only 
grew enthusiastic when he encountered 
some canvases of F. S. Church. He did 
not care for Th. W. Dewing’s ideal repre- 
sentations of American womanhood, nor 
for old Newman’s colour dreams, but for 
the “ Viking’s Daughter,” with a cluster of 
sea-gulls fluttering around her head, which, 
with the well-known “Surf Phantom ’’and 
“ Knowledge is Power,” represents the best 
work this painter has produced. Its sug- 
gestiveness, expressed by a poetic idea 
and delicate colours, with a preference for 


296 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

fragile grays and whites, interested the 
man from the land of chrysanthemums. 

E. H. Blashfield’s (1848- ) career is 

closely identified with antique genre and 
decorative picture painting. His mature, 
intellectual, and dignified talent reached 
its height probably in his “ Angel with 
the Fiery Sword.” “ Strains of Grey,” 
depicting a laurel-wreathed, youthful fig- 
ure holding a large, ancient string in- 
strument in its hand, is, for its simple 
composition, the naive pose of the figure, 
the reverie expressed in the face, and its 
soft, subdued tone of delicious grays, per- 
haps the most satisfactory work the artist 
has accomplished. 

Siddons Mowbray was born 1854, of 
English parents, in Alexandria, Egypt. 
This coincidence apparently has influ- 
enced his choice of subjects. He has 
become the depicter of half-draped femi- 
ninity in rich costumes lounging about in 




THE NEW SCHOOL. 


299 


Oriental interiors. Only in a few in- 
stances has he attempted more important 
compositions like “ Aladdin,” “ Rose Har- 
vest,” “ Arcadia,” “ Scheherezade,” and 
“ Evening Breeze.” Although neither an 
ethnologist striving fatuously to recon- 
struct the life and characteristics of the 
Orient, nor a painter of simple prettiness, 
he was unable to improve upon the one 
particular idea, which he had formed and 
elaborated in early life. Other artists who 
treat imaginative subjects are Kenyon 
Cox, G. W. Maynard, W. H. Low, E. A. 
Bell, Louis Loeb, Ch. C. Curran, Bryson 
Burroughs, H. Prellwitz, and W. F. Kline. 

The most exalted position in this branch 
of art miust be given to Thomas W. 
Dewing (1851- ), born in Boston, a pupil 

of Boulanger and Lefebvre. The charm 
of his subjects, for instance, his “ Musi- 
cian,” a lady sitting in reverie at the piano 
(at the house of Freer), and his “ Lady 


300 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

in Yellow” (’89, owned by Mrs. J. L. 
Gardner, Boston), gained him an early 
reputation, at least in the profession. 
During my manifold visits to artists’ 
studios, I asked a dozen or more of our 
prominent painters, belonging to the most 
antagonistic schools, whom they consid- 
ered the best artists of America; their 
lists varied largely, but, strange to say. 
Dewing was invariably mentioned. 

I, for my part, can never look at a 
picture of Dewing’s without being deeply 
moved. His instinct for beauty, poetic 
expression, and mystic grace satisfy my 
desire to forget every-day life completely. 

His pictures leave an afterglow, and 
that is a decided merit. In this world, 
with its thousands of interests, a man’s 
works must be quite powerful in order to 
become so important to us as to form a 
part, however small it may be, of our 
intellectual life. 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


301 


Dewing’s pictures have a certain some- 
thing that reminds me of a rare piece of 
furniture* which has been beautified by a 
coating of vernis Martin, 

I know of nothing in painting which 
possesses such an exquisite (intellectual) 
flavour, except it were the browns of Or- 
chardson or the grayish greens of Theo- 
phile Reichardt. It is a most peculiar 
flavour. I am quite a connoisseur of wines, 
let me see if I can fix it. It is some rare 
brand. It is neither Chateau d’Yquem, nor 
Tokay, nor Lachrimae Christi, nor Veuve 
Clicquot. Now I have it. It is perhaps 
like a cup of Imperial Japanese tea, at 
about twenty dollars a pound, of mild 
florescence, delicious in taste, and yet with 
some strength, by no means effeminate. 

The pictures of Dewing are devoted to 
a certain type of human beings ; to rep- 
resent beautiful ladies, mostly mature 
women of thirty, is their sole aim. 


302 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

The ladies all seem to possess large 
fortunes and no inclination for any profes- 
sional work. They all seem to live in a 
Pre-Raphaelite atmosphere, in mysterious 
gardens, on wide, lonesome lawns, or in 
spacious empty interiors, where one feels 
a son aise, with something Old Italian 
about them. They are dressed in the 
latest fashions, which are, nevertheless, so 
idealised that they look almost like the 
liberty costumes of Burne Jones. These 
ladies use the best perfume in the market. 
They love beautiful large flowers, and 
their long, tapering fingers like to glide 
over all sorts of string instruments, and 
there they sit and stand, and dream or 
play the lute or read legends, sometimes 
two together, sometimes three, and even 
in larger numbers, all without individu- 
ality, but belonging together by a peculiar 
resemblance of costume, of form and sen- 
timent. As with the majority of women, 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


303 


one might think that the philosophy of 
life of Dewing’s heroines also consisted 
of fashion and amusement, but in this 
company of idol-women it is different ; 
they all have a dream-like tendency, and, 
though absolutely modern, are something 
quite different from what we generally un- 
derstand by modern women. Their ideal 
is to be found probably between the 
Antique and the Early Renaissance. 
They would like to look like the compan- 
ions of Nausicaa, as Botticelli conceives 
them, with the education and reading of 
a grande dame of the Italian High Re- 
naissance. They are like amateur actresses 
in sympathetic, suffering, passive roles. 
They entertain a conversation as far re- 
moved from our world as was the party 
in the Decameron of Boccaccio from the 
pestilence, only that our society lacks 
the youthful strength and pagan ingenuity 
of that time. 


304 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

They lead, indeed, a life of reflec- 
tion ; they seem to be melancholy without 
reasons, merely because suffering is poet- 
ical. When Dewing paints them, he takes 
good care to avoid expressing even a re- 
flection of the genuinely devout feeling 
of the Middle Ages, as Rossetti or Henri 
Martin do, — he depicts the romantic ten- 
dency of our refined American ladies, who 
transform their boudoirs into sanctuaries 
devoted to the worship of their own indi- 
vidual tastes, who read Swinburne, are 
fond of orchids, and loll about on divans 
in their large, solitary parlours, in expecta- 
tion, perhaps, of a sentimental knight in 
glittering armour (made of silver dollars) 
prancing in on a palfrey. 

Thomas Dewing is the only American 
painter who has succeeded in giving us 
pictures of women that might stand for 
the “ ideal American ” type. 

He does not merely get their aesthetic 



Copyright, 1895, by John Gellattly. 











THE NEW SCHOOL. 307 

elegance, but succeeds in making them 
express psychological suggestions (pro- 
duced by indolence in an artistic atmos- 
phere) with a vague mixture of the Pari- 
sian demi-monde, a rare combination of 
piquancy, refinement, and dream-like qual- 
ities. He is also an excellent portrait 
painter of women, but after all best in 
those compositions which recall the fla- 
vour of Imperial tea and the hue of vernis 
Martin^ gems like “ A Musician,” like 
several of his long-necked ladies in yel- 
low, in black, or in blue, each distinct in 
their soul atmosphere ; as also in that 
modern Tanagra figure called “ Girl in 
White,” in his delicate pastels and dainty 
fancies in silver point, and the exquisite 
poem, “ In the Garden,” one of the few 
perfect masterpieces which American 
figure painting has produced. 

The quality in Dewing’s work which 
appeals to me beyond every other is its 


3o8 a history of American art. 

personal character; it reflects the man’s 
mind, that of a refined epicureanism, 
choosing naturally to live among dainty 
surroundings and beautiful \y^men ; it is a 
fastidious seeking of the unconvention- 
ally beautiful and an expression of it that 
does not smack of any school, although it 
shows a hard and severe training of the 
eye and hand, and no sparing of strenuous 
study. 

It is left to us now to mention that 
artist who is most fit to conclude this 
chapter, as he represents both schools, 
the old in his technique, and the new in 
his ideas. It would be more just still to 
say, perhaps, that he belongs to no school 
at all, as he is one of those idealists who 
might have been born at any time and in 
any land. I mean A. P. Ryder (1841- ), 

born at New Bedford, Mass., self-taught, 
enjoying for a short time only the tuition 
of W. E. Marshall, the engraver. 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 3O9 

I do not remember under what circum- 
stance the name of A. P. Ryder was first 
mentioned to me ; there was, however, 
something about the manner in which it 
was mentioned that made an impression 
upon me. Then I recalled having seen 
an article in the Century a few years 
ago (June, 1890), in which several wood 
engravings from his pictures — though 
too much Kingsley and not enough 
Ryder — interested me so much that I 
forgot to read the text. A tempting 
suggestion of some unexplored mystery 
rose within me, and I decided to visit 
Ryder. 

This was not easy ; more than a dozen 
times I called at the simple, old-fashioned 
house in East Eleventh Street where he 
used a third story back room as studio. 
Then I wTote him about my many fruit- 
less calls, and received as reply a kind 
invitation, with an excuse for not having 


310 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

been in, as he had been “absorbing the 
lovely November skies.” 

On the appointed evening I met him in 
a tavern. I have a very bad memory for 
faces, and therefore do not dare to de- 
scribe Mr. Ryder’s appearance, as inter- 
viewers are apt to do. A reddish full 
beard, a dreaminess in his eyes, a certain 
softness, with a touch of awkwardness in 
his general bearing, seemed to me leading 
characteristics. 

After a glass of beer and a cigar we 
strolled to his workshop near by. 

As I entered the little two-windowed 
den — Mr. Ryder lighting the gas jet 
which could not even pride itself on hav- 
ing a globe — my eye met a great disor- 
der of canvases of a peculiar dark turbid 
tone, lying about in every possible posi- 
tion, amidst a heap of rubbish and a few 
pieces of old, rickety, dusty furniture, cov- 
ered with clothes, old magazines and 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


3II 

papers, boxes, plaster casts, a collection 
of odds and ends of cord and twine neatly 
rolled up, etc. — everything spotted with 
lumps of hard, dry colour and varnish. 
I involuntarily had to think of a dump in 
which street urchins might search for 
hidden treasures. 

Mr. Ryder began to show me some of 
his half-finished pictures, and I was car- 
ried away into a fairyland of imaginative 
landscapes, ultramarine skies and seas, 
and mellow, yellowish lights, peopled by 
beings that seemed to be all poetic fancy 
and soul: 

Scenes from “The Tempest” and “ Mac- 
beth ; ” a skeleton on horseback galloping 
through an empty racetrack in the moon- 
light ; a Desdemona ; a scene of Arabs 
with camels and tents ; a landscape with 
soft, greenish notes and a good deal of 
yellow in it; a few moonglade marines, 
little canvases that might serve as “per- 


312 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

manent colour inspirations ; ” a Christ 
and Magdalen, apparently undertaken 
more to express individual sensuousness 
than Biblical glory. ^ 

They passed on, one by one ; I, having 
a peculiar mania for searching in every 
expression of art, and life as well, for its 
most individual, perhaps innermost es- 
sence, tried in vain to form an estimate. 

I anxiously lay in wait for an opportunity 
to enter Ryder’s individuality; to find a 
key to all its treasures. His sense for 
colours — gorgeous, ponderous as it is in 
his blues, soft, caressing in his yellows, 
and weird in his lilac greens — seems to 
me but an inferior quality. I fail to see 
that he is a great colourist; surely he is 
not a colourist in the sense of Titian, 
Delacroix, Turner, Makart, Bocklin, or 
Chavannes — even La Farge and New- 
man are, in my opinion, by far better 
colourists; he is not even a tone painter 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 313 

like Michel, Whistler, or Maris; also, to 
Monticelli and Diaz he is related more in 
regard to method than colour; Ryder is 
a chiaroscurist, an ideal black-and-white 
artist, with a special aptitude for moon- 
light effects. His technique, reminding 
me somehow of Blake’s wood-cuts, is quite 
his own : the heavy “ loading ” of his 
canvases, the muddy, rather monotonous 
brush work (holding the brush at the mid- 
dle of the handle and hesitatingly drag- 
ging it across the canvas), the constant 
using of strong contrasts of dark and light 
colours, and the lavish pouring of varnish 
over the canvas while he paints, to realise 
lustre, depth, and mystery. 

Ryder showed me a little panel, not 
larger than 6 x lo, representing a mediaeval 
maiden sitting on the shore and playing 
the lute, while behind her in the distance 
vessels are floating by. 

“ I tried to make it like a little volume 


314 A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART. 

of poetry,” he remarked. And then he 
recited, with a nonchalant but soul-steeped 
voice, the poem he had written to it ; 

“ By a deep flowing river 
There’s a maiden pale, 

And her ruby lips quiver 
A song on the gale. 

“ A wild note of longing, 

Entrancing to hear — 

A wild song of longing 
Calls sad on the ear. 

“Adown the same river 
A youth floats along, 

And the lifting waves shiver 
As he echoes her song. 

Nearer, still nearer 

His frail bark doth glide ; 

Will he shape his course to her 
And remain by her side ? 

“ Alas, there’s no rudder 

To the ship that he sails ; 

The maiden doth shudder — 

Blow seaward, ye gales ! 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


315 


“ Sweeter and fainter 

The song cometh back, 

And her brain it will bother 
And her heart it will rack. 

“ And thus she’ll grow paler 
With this fond memory, 

Paler and paler 

And thus she will die.” 

Some artists accuse him of being de- 
pendent on the old masters. Probably 
they are right; every artist must get his 
inspirations somewhere, it really matters 
little where, as long as he is original him- 
self. True, Ryder’s pictures are some- 
what like old masters; yet they rather 
look like old pictures in general, than re- 
semble any particular m.aster, and, there- 
fore, this mediceval appearance indicates 
no imitative, but, on the contrary, a 
creative faculty. 

Also, in painting poetic subjects, he can 
hardly be called dependent. What have 


3i6 a history of American art. 

Chaucer’s lines to do with yonder boat 
floating mysteriously on moonlit waters ? 
There is some female figure in the boat, 
but what matters it to us whether it 
be a heroine of Chaucer’s or Ryder’s 
imagination. 

Looking about the room, I suddenly 
saw a life-size portrait gazing at me from 
a corner. The first glance told me that 
it was a man in United States uniform; 
after that I only saw the face : the tight- 
ened lips, the eyes, it was as if a soul were 
bursting from them, and then it seemed 
to me as if Ryder, his soul was steadily 
gazing at me. 

This portrait immediately gave me a 
keener insight into his artistic character 
than any other picture. Everything was 
sacrificed to express the radiance of the 
innermost, the most subtle and most 
intense expression of a human soul. Per- 
haps my impulsive nature, the extraordi- 


THE NEW SCHOOL. 


317 

nary hour, the gaslight’s hectic glare o’er 
the lapis-lazuli spots on his canvases may 
explain a good deal of the enchantment I 
felt on that evening. One thing is sure, 
that my first visit to Ryder was one of 
those hours never to be forgotten. 

It is Ryder’s overflow of sentiment, 
curbed (sometimes even suppressed for 
the moment) by a sturdy awkwardness, 
which also now and then appears on the 
apparently so mild surface of his charac- 
ter; this patient waiting (running away 
from his studio to absorb November skies 
or moonlit nights, and returning to his 
canvases at all times of the day and night 
whenever a new idea suggests itself) until 
he can condense all the manifold inspira- 
tions, of which a picture is created, into 
the most perfect one at his command, 
makes his art so great that it can hold its 
ground, even in the company of illustrious 
masterpieces. 


3i8 a history of American art. 

One must see his “ Siegfried ” (owned 
by Van Hornen, Montreal) riding along 
the Rhine, meeting the Rhinedaughters 
near a mighty oak, all bathed in a cold, 
armour-glittering moonshine, to realise 
how he can flood a picture with sensu- 
ous, bewitching poetry; and in order to 
fathom how far he can climb in grandeur 
of thought and composition one must 
study his “Jonah” (owned by C. E. S. 
Wood, Portland, Ont), and his “ Flying 
Dutchman,” the world-weary phantom 
ship, adrift on the tempestuous sea of 
time, — its colossal troughs bedizened 
with the lurid glamour of a goblin sun, 
— is seen struggling in the left dis- 
tance, in an atmosphere laden with 
Good Friday gloom and glory, on a 
mighty wave, upwards! This upward 
movement is genius, pure and mighty, 
that will live for centuries to come 
(if no varnish slides occur). It is a 



Rydek. — Flying Dutchman. 




THE NEW SCHOOL. 


321 


picture as impressive as religion, one 
of the few that sound the note of sub- 
limity which is, after all, the highest in 
art. 


END OF VOLUME I. 



INDEX. 


Alexander, Cosmo, i6. 
Allston, Washington, i6, 32, 
36 et seq., 43. 

Ames, 146. 

Angelo, Michael, 69. 
Armstrong, 186. 

Babcock, W\ A., 187. 
Bainbridge, Henry, 35. 

Baker, G., 146, 149. 

Barnard, E., 102. 

Bartol, Elizabeth H., 169. 
Battoni, 35. 

Beard, W. H., 241. 

Beaux, Cecilia, 286, 288 et seq., 
290. 

Becket, Maria a, 104, 239, 290. 
Beckwith, Carroll, 223. 

Bell, E. A., 224, 299. 

Bellows, A. F., 66. 

Berry, P. V., 67. 

Besnard, 102. 

Bierstadt, Albert, 69. 
Blackburn, 16. 

Blake, 313. 

Blakelock, R. A., 107. 
Blashfield, E. H., 296. 

Blum, Robert, 254, 258, 284 
et seq. 


Bocklin, 312. 

Bonheur, Rosa, 290. 

Bonnat, 289. 

Bouguereau, 217. 

Bradford, William, 232. 
Brandegee, R. L., 286, 287. 
Bremen, Meyer von, 153. 
Bridgman, 174, 220. 

Bristol, J. B., 66. 

Brown, Geo. L., 57. 

Brown, Harry, 232. 

Brown, J. B., 155. j 

Brown, Madox, 186. 

Brown, Ogden, 240. 

Browne, Appleton, 108. 

Brush, George de Forrest, 220, 
262, 265. 

Bullard, O. A., 16. 

Bunce, Gedney, 236. 

Burne Jones, 302. 

Burroughs, Bryson, 299. 

Caliga, J. H., 280. 

Carlsen, Emil, 250. 

Cary, W., 260. 

Casilear, J. W., 58. 

Cassett, Mary, 290. 

Catlin, G., 152. 

Cazin, 107. 


323 


324 


INDEX. 


Chartran, 153. 

Chase, W. M., 117, 219, 220, 
221, 226, 229, 250, 254. 
Chavannes, 134, 312. 

Child, Jane B., 293. 

Church, Fred’k E., 70 et seq.^ 
140. 

Church, F. S., 109, 135, 241, 
294 et seq. 

Cole, Thomas, 46 et seq.^ 140, 

233- 

Colman, Samuel, 77, 220, 

254 - 

Constable, 48, 66. 

Cook, Clarence, 77. 

Copley, John Singleton, 15, 
16, 20, 21, 141. 

Coralossi, 217. 

Cordoba, Matilda de, 293. 
Corot, 79, 93, 95, 107. 

Cotton, Mrs. Leslie, 230. 
Couture, 146, 165, 166, 167. 
Cox, Kenyon, 223, 299. 
Cranch, C. P., 58. 

Cronau, Rudolf, 260. 

^ropsey, J. F., 59 et seq. 
Ciowninshield, 186. 

Cm -an, C. C., 109, 230, 231. 
Curn^r, 220. 

Daingerfield, E., 187. 
Dannant, 220. 

Daubigny, 105, 128. 

David, 21, 35. 

Davis, Charles H., 85, 86 et 
seq. 

Dean, Walter, 236. 

Dearth, G. H., 117. 

Deas, 152. 

De Forrest, 220. 

Degas, 226. 

Delacroix, 312. 


Deming, E. W., 260. 

De Neuville, 251. 

Detaille, 252. 

Dewey, Melville, 56. 

Dewing, Mrs., 249. 

Dewing, Thomas W., 135, 
191, 245, 295, 299 et seq. 
Diaz, 107, 313. 

Dix, Charles Temple, 232. 
Dodge, 260. 

Doornick, F. V., 16. 

Doughty, Thomas, 52 et seq. 
Dow, A. B., 1 12. 

Dunlap, William, 46. 

Dupre, 79, 93, 107. 

Duran, Carolus, 217, 286. 
Durand, Asher B., 46, 53. 
Duveneck, Frank, 220, 223. 

Eakins, Thomas, 189, 200 et 
seq., 220. 

Eaton, Charles W., 117. 
Eaton, Wyatt, 220, 221. 
Edmonds, F. W., 151. 
Eggleston, Benjamin, 280. 
Elliot, Charles Loring, 146. 
English, F. F., 236. 

Enneking, J. J., 102, 108. 
Eugene, Frank, 224. 

Falconer, J. M., 77. 

Farny, H. F., 260. 

Farrar, Henry, 77, 78. 

Feke, Robert, 25. 

Fitz, B. R., 42, 221. 
Fitzpatrick, L., 293. 

Forbes, Elizabeth, 230. 

Foster, Birket, 67. 

Freer, F. W., 280. 

Fuller, George, 42, 147, 208 
et seq., 219, 220. 

Furness, Henry, 177. 


INDEX. 


325 


Gainsborough, 27, 107. 
Gallagher, Sears, 109. 
Gaugengigl, J. M., 283. 

Gaul, Gilbert, 251, 259. 

Gay, Walter, 65. 

Gerome, 217, 271. 

Gerry, S. L., 58. 

Gifford, Sandford R., 55 ct 
seq. 

Gifford, Swain, 85. 

Gignoux, Regis, 95. 

Goodrich, Miss, 149. 

Graves, Abbott, 249. 

Gray, H. P., 146, 149. 
Greatorex, Eliza, 253. 

Green, Miss, 248. 

Greene, C. E. L., 117. 

Guy, Francis, 253. 

Guy, S. J., 193. 

Haas, F. H. de, 234. 

Hale, Geo. R., 248. 

Halsall, W. F., 239. 

Halsted, R. H., 96 et seq. 
Hamilton, E. W. D., 260. 
Hamilton, Hamilton, 85. 
Hamilton, James, 233. 
Harding, Chester, 140. 
Harpignies, 128. 

Hart, James, 64, 65, 240. 
Hart, William, 64, 65, 240. 
Hartshome, H. M., 207. 
Hassam, Childe, 102, 254. 
Haven, F. de, 118, 119. 
Havens, Belle, 293. 

Hayden, 102. 

Hayes, William, 240. 

Heade, M. J., 248. 

Healy, 146. 

Heinigke, 186. 

Henri, R., 106, 257. 

Henry, E. L., 156. 


Herter, Albert, 109. 

Hicks, 146, 148. 

Hill, Thomas, 69, 75, 78. 
Homer, Winslow, 109, 164, 
189 et seq., 240, 250. 
Hovenden, Th. F., 281. 

Howe, 240. 

Hubbard, R. W., 58. 

Hunt, W. M., 105, 166 et seq., 
218, 219, 220, 250. 
Huntington, Daniel, 146, 149 
et seq. 

Inman, Henry, 139 et seq. 
Inness, George, 94 et seq., 219, 
220, 241. 

Irving, J. B., 151. 

Johnson, David, 66. 

Johnson, Eastman, 157 et seq. 
Johnson, Fred., 163. 

Jones, Bolton, 108. 

Julien, 217, 226. 

Kappes, Alfred, 164. 

Keith, W., 75, 78. 

Kendall, Sargent, 112, 280. 
Kensett, John F., 55. 

King, Samuel, 16. 

Klumpke, A. E., 293. 

Kost, F., 1 19. 

Krimmel, J. L., 253. 

La Farge, 109, 178, 218, 220, 
249, 258, 312. 

Lamb, 186. 

Landseer, 240. 

Langley, Chas. E., 230. 
Lathrop, Francis L., 179. 
Lathrop, W. L., 109, 119, 120. 
Latoix, Gaspard, 260. 
Lawrence, Thomas, 33, 48. 


326 


INDEX. 


Lawrence, W. H., 258. 
Lawson, E., 102. 

Lay, Oliver J., 163. 

Le Clear, 146. 

Lee, Homer, 118. 

Lefebvre, 217. 

Le Page, Bastien, 156, 218. 
Lessing, 61 etseq., 145. 
Leutze, Emmanuel, 142, 250. 
Linford, Charles, 116. 
Lockwood, Wilton, 280. 

Loeb, Louis, 280, 299. 

Lofftz, 278. 

Lorraine, Claude, 48. 

Low, W. H., 223, 299. 
Lungren, 117, 254. 

Macomber, M. L., 187. 
Magrath, William, 162. 
Malbone, 16. 

Manet, loi, 105, 106. 

Maris, 313. 

Martin, Henri, 304. 

Martin, Homer, 94, loi, 105, 
220. 

May, Edward Harrison, 165. 
Maynard, G. W., 299. 
McChesney, Clara, 109, 293. 
McConkey, 140. 

McEntee, Jervis, 83 et seq.^ 90. 
Mcllhenny, Morgan, 116. 
Meeker, J. R., 58. 

Mengs, 35. 

Meteyard, 102. 

Meyer, F. B., 154. 

Michel, 79, 212. 

Mielatz, 254. 

Mignot, Louis, 57. 

Miller, Chas. H., 67, 219. 
Millet, 79, 95, 106, 166. 

Minor, R. C., 107. 

Moeller, Louis, 282. 


Monet, loi, 102, 106. 

Monks, J. A. S., 242. 
Monticelli, 313. 

Moore, Chas., 78. 

Moran, Peter, 240. 

Moran, Thomas, 69, 70, 74, 
78, 219. 

Moreland, 240. 

Morot, 252. 

Morse, Samuel F. B., 137. 
Mosler, 260. 

Mount, William Sidney, 140, 

150* 153- 

Mowbray, Siddons, 296. 
Murphy, J. F., 109. 

Naegle, 146. 

Needham, Charles A., 118, 

257- 

Nehlig, Victor, 152. 

Newman, R. L., 188, 295, 312, 
Nichols, Rhoda Holmes, 109, 
Norton, W. E., 235. 

Nourse, Elizabeth, 294. 

Oakey, M. R., 220, 249, 290. 
Oakley, Violet, 187, 290. 
Ochtman, L., 112. 

Overbeck, 35. 

Page, William, 146, 147. 
Parrish, Clara Weaver, 293. 
Parrish, Stephen, 112, 115. 
Parshall, 78. 

Parsons, 258. 

Parton, Arthur, 118. 

Peale, Charles Wilson, 16, 26, 
Pearce, C. S., 220. 

Pennell, 254, 

Peters, Charles Rollo, 76. 
Peters, John E. C., 234. 
Picknell, W. L., 85 et seq. 


V 


INDEX. 


327 


Pine, 16. 

Pissaro, lOI. 

Platt, C. A., 1 12. 

Poore, H. R., 242 
Pratt, Matthew, 25. 

Prellwitz, Edith Mitchell, 294. 
Prichard, J. A., 117. 

Quidor, John, 148. 

Rafaelli, 102. 

Ranger, H. W., 107. 

Ranney, W. H., 152. 

Redfield, 106. 

Rehn, F. K. M., 239. 

Reichart, Theophile, 301. 

Reid, Robert, 230. 

Renoir, loi. 

Reynolds, Si' Joshua, 22. 
Richards, W. T., 64, 233. 
Richardson, H. H., 179. 

Rix, Julian, 107. 

Robbins, Horace, 78. 

Robert, 156. 

Robinson, Theodore, 103 et 
seq., 220. 

Robinson, W., 102, 173, 240. 
Rogers, Donoghue, 85. 

Rollins, Miss, 248. 

Romney, 27. 

Rosa, Salvator, 34, 48. 
Rossetti, 304. 

Rothermel, 250. 

Rousseau, 79, 95, 107. 

Ruskin, 156. 

Ryder, A. P., 82, 239, 241, 
308 et seq. 

Sargent, 220. 

Sartain, William, 174. 

Savage, E., 16. 

Schilling, Alexander, 119, 120. 


Schofield, 106. 

Scott, Miss E. M., 249. 

Scott Julian, 250. 

Schreyer, 259. 

Schiissel, 64. 

Senat, Prosper L., 174. 

Sewell, Amelia B., 293. 
Shadow, 145. 

Shearer, 64, 102. 

Sherwood, Emma, 230. 
Shilling, A., 109. 

Shinn, Everett, 258. 

Shirlaw, Walter, 74, 109, 219, 
220, 221, 223, 259. 

Shurtleff, R. M., 64, 241. 
Simmons, Edward, 284. 

Sisley, loi. 

Smillie, George, 78. 

Smillie, James, 78. 

Smith, De Cost, 260. 

Smybert, John, 15. 

Snell, Henry B., no, 239. 
Snyder, 240. 

Sonntag, W. L., 65. 

Staigg, 146, 149. 

Sterner, A. E., 109. 

St. Gaudens, 218. 

Story, Geo. A., 177. 

Stuart, Gilbert, 16, 26, 137, 
141. 

Sully, Thomas, 32 et seq.., 
141. 

Suydam, J. A., 58. 

Taylor, 102. 

Thayer, Abbot, 135, 220, 265, 
2^1 et seq. 

Thom, J. C., 164. 

Thomas, Seymour, 230. 
Thompson, Wordsworth, 162. 
Thorpe, J. B., 240. 

Thouron, H. J., 186. 


328 


INDEX. 


Tiffany, Louis C., i86, 220, 
253* 

Tintoretto, 43. 

Titian, 312. 

Tompkins, F. O., 277. 

Trego, W., 251. 

Triscott, S. P. R., 109. 
Trumbull, John, 15, 26, 31, 
43> 46. 

Tryon, Dwight W., 94, loi, 
121, 126 et seq.y 191, 220, 
245- 

Turner, J. M. W., 48, 312. 
Turner, Ross, 109. 
Twachtman, J. H., 112, 220. 

Ullman, E. P., 230. 

Vanderlyn, John, 32, 34, 41 
et seq. 

Van Dyck, 15. 

Van Huysum, 248. 

Vedder, Elihu, 82. 

Velasquez, 226. 

Veronese, 43. 

Vinton, 286. 

Volk, D., 220. 

Wagner, Jacob, 102. 

Walker, Horatio, 109, 121, 
242 et seq. 


Walker, H. O., 276. 

Ward, E. M., 162. 

Warner, Olin, 220. 

Waterman, Marcus, 173, 241, 
Waugh, Ida, 293. 

W eber, Paul, 63 et seq. 
Weeks, 174. 

Weir, Alden, 249. 

Weir, John F., 154. 

Weir, Robert W., 141. 
Weldon, C. D., 258. 

West, Benjamin, 21 seq.y 35. 
Whistler, J. McN., 135, 190, 
220, 226, 313. 

White, Edwin, 162, 164. 
Whitman, Mrs. S. W., 169. 
Whittredge, Worthington, 64. 
Wiggins, Carleton, 240. 
Willard, A. W., 154. 

Wiles, Irving, 230. 

Williams, 16. 

Wiman, C. F., 152. 

Wood,T. W., 154, 164. 
Woodbury, C. H., 116. 
Woodville, Richard Carton, 

151- 

Wyant, A. H., 90 et seq., 220. 
Young, Harvey, 173, 177. 
Zorn, 229, 286. 








GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 

lllllilliil 

3 3125 01299 0566 



